This classifies as another word that I knew was new, but didn’t know was that new.

Jitters entered English round about 1925–and it’s not entirely clear where it came from. The best guess is that it’s a variation of chitter, which had been a dialectical word for “tremble, shiver,” since Middle English.

The jitterbug, 1947

It took it another 6 years for the ‘s’ to get dropped and the noun to become a verb–to jitter. And another 7 for the jitterbug dance to join the scene. Still, that’s a lot of evolution for just over a decade!

And as cold as it is here this morning, there could easily be some jittering going on. 😉

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