Cwtch

The New Ninja Bomber and I are back in the smoke after a week's cwtch with his cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents in Legoland and latterly Wales.

Cwtch is evocative for me, as I remember my Mum saying it when I was a little boy. I wasn't sure if I would find any references to it online, but googling I came across this, published in the Western Mail when cwtch ascended to the OED in 2005:

IT'S one of the nation's favourite words, and symbolises that warm feeling that only closeness to a loved one can create.

Exactly.

Later in the article, Nicholas Shearing - senior editor on the new words group of the Oxford English Dictionary - is quoted as saying:

"Our job is to record the language. And we found the word cwtch was turning up more and more.
"Part of the reason is there has been a spate of writing which recognises Welsh-English as a legitimate dialect, such as Sean Burke.
"When a word gets into the dictionary, it reflects people are more
comfortable with using it."

Hooray for Sean, one of my oldest friends, and now it would seem venerable language maven. (I am aware that read literally the sentence I quote does seem to suggest that he is a "spate of writing" or a "legitimate dialect" rather than an exemplar of the authors writing in Welsh-English, but live and let live, pedantry is the last refuge of the second rate.)