Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Zounderkite

Here is an vintage word that is perfect for our times: zounderkite.

Any ideas as to what it means?

Go ahead, guess! (No fair peeking on Google.) And then, keep reading to see if you are right...

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According to the Dictionary.com article Insults We Should Bring Back, zounderkite is a Victorian word meaning "idiot." It shows up in many lists of vintage curse words, including 22 Incredible Forgotten Curse Words from Way Back in the Day (which expands on the simple one-word definition with: "a complete idiot who constantly makes clumsy and awkward mistakes"), and BBC America's 10 Victorian Swears from the Real "Ripper Street" (which goes whole hog: "the kind of bumbling idiot that will end up making a disastrous mistake of the sort that beggars belief").

BBC America provided a source, which was a good thing, because this word did not appear in any of my hard copy dictionaries, including Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. However, their source—1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue—does not contain zounderkite.

What do they take me for, an idiot? That I would not check the source?

I turned to N-gram, thinking surely it would show up there. Nope. Nothing.

Determined, I delved a little further into Google Books, hoping to find a 19th century mention. I finally found it, I'm proud to say, in the 1876 A Glossary of Surrey Words (A Supplement to No. 12.) by Granville William Gresham Leveson Gower, in the Mid-Yorkshire section, where it appears between zookerins! and zounds! 

There it is! Proof, at last!

I think the scarcity of zounderkite in books in general might mean it was a word more spoken than written, at least in the past.

My thrashing about also turned up a Zounderkite family of fonts.
One just never knows what will turn up during Slang-o-rama research.