Gobermouch

The list gives gobermouch as a nosy person. The word it seems to be reaching for means something else — and it is a better word.

That word is gobemouche, and it is French: gober, to gulp down or swallow whole, and mouche, a fly. A fly-swallower. The picture is of someone standing about with their mouth hanging open, so absorbed or so astonished that a fly could wander straight in.

It came into English in the early nineteenth century — the OED's earliest evidence is from 1818 — and it has always meant a credulous person. Not someone who pries into gossip, but someone who swallows it. Whatever they are told, they believe.

That is a real distinction. A nosy person goes looking for information. A gobemouche will take whatever arrives, flies included.

We could not find a period source for the -r- spelling, gobermouch, or for the meaning nosy. Both may simply be the list drifting, the way lists do. The original, meanwhile, has never been more useful: a word for someone who believes everything they read — including, as it happens, lists like this one.