DCHP-2

peasoup ((2)) Peasoup, pea-soup, pea soup, pea souper, pea-souper DCHP-2 (November 2016)

• 1 adj. — informal

  extremely foggy.

  Type: 2. Preservation — Pea soup or peasouper, relating to a thick fog, is a preservation from British English, with adjectival uses documented more than six decades before nominal ones (see meaning 2).
  London, England, in particular, became notorious as its population surged during the Industrial Revolution for heavy, yellow fogs in autumn caused by coal fires. Though OED-3 (s.v. "pea-souper" (1)) marks peasouper as a British colloquialism, internet search results indicate the term is currently most frequent in Canada, closely followed by several other former British colonies, with frequency actually being the lowest in the UK (see Chart 1).

  See also:   

• 2 n. — informal

  a dense, yellowish fog.

  Type: 2. Preservation — Attested adjectival uses (see meaning 1) are older than the nominal uses shown here by about six decades. It seems possible, in contrast to our assessment of the same scenario in peasoup ((1)), that the nominal function is, in this meaning, younger than the adjectival one.