In general, the meaning was profit, advantage, usefulness, but in Yorkshire the word was often applied to cattle and it could have several distinct shades of meaning. These all had to do with the animal’s profitability in the period it was able to give milk after calving.
Oatmeal was made by grinding ‘shilling’, that is oats from which the husks had been removed, and it was formerly a major element in the diet of most Yorkshire families.
These were lanes or roads which were constructed as a result of the Parliamentary Inclosures Acts, designed to provide access for landholders to the newly-created allotments.
This word has become more restricted in meaning over the centuries, and for many people now it signifies those parts of a butchered animal which remain when the carcass has been dressed, i.e. the kidneys, heart, tongue and liver.
This is an obsolete spelling of ‘elephant’, less usual than ‘oliphant’, but retained in the sense of ivory, especially as one of the hafting materials used by Sheffield cutlers.
In the earliest contexts ‘ooze’ meant juice, sap; the liquid obtained from a plant, fruit or the like, and a fifteenth-century reference described squeezing the ‘wose’ out from grapes (OED). It is distinct from ‘ooze’ in the sense of mud but the meanings of the two words overlapped from the sixteenth century when the tannin liquor in which the hides were steeped was called ooze, probably ground oak bark in water.
When there was water in a coal-mine it presented colliers with problems that could only be solved by draining, that is by ‘opening’ soughs or Watergates.
This term became popular in the twentieth century when it was applied to mines where the ground surface was removed and the coal removed without shafts or galleries. It is actually on record though from the early 1700s when the verb ‘to cast’ still retained the meaning of ‘to dig’, as when throwing up a bank or earthwork.