The dust from coal, or colly, causes widespread upset. "Collywobbles" is recorded in Pierce Egan's edition of Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1823, as "the gripes", possibly referring to "colic" or a symptom or folk description of cholers. At least one earlier use, in a slightly different - apparently nonsensical - meaning, is known from an 1807 letter reprinted in "Letters and Miscellaneous Papers" by Barré Charles Roberts, 1814.
