A few months back I used a word in one of my work-in-progress novels that my word processor’s spellchecker did not like but was a completely legitimate word. That word was ‘scritching.’ No, not ‘scratching’ or ‘screeching',’ but ‘scritching’ the gerund form of the word ‘scritch'. Why didn’t it like it if it is indeed a real word? Well, probably because (like a lot of the words I enjoy) it is really, really old; slightly obscure; and generally considered an obsolete word. Which is a real shame as I rather love this word as it’s another one of those words that sounds exactly like it’s meaning and is just fun to say. Though, according to some sites I looked at, the word’s usage trend has been rising.
According to one site I looked at, scritch is derived from the Old English word scriðan meaning ‘to glide or scratch’ and related to the Middle English word scrithen which, similarly, means ‘to move quickly or stealthily.’ The Oxford English Dictionary also lists scritch as being of Middle English origin putting their earliest known recorded usage of the word as being from before 1300 citing the poem The Owl and the Nightingale as their source.
The word has a few usages. It can mean to make a scratching sound (like that of a mouse or a quill pen on paper); it can refer to the action of scratching with fingernails or claws; a piercing or grating sound (due to a scraping of one thing against another); or to move stealthily. Scritch can also be a dialectal variant of the word ‘screech.’
There is also a Germanic line in the linage of the word (and its Old and Middle English counterparts) as it is related to the German word schratten which also means ‘to scratch.’
Although closely paralleling each other, scritch is not totally interchangeable with scratch as each has their own shades of meaning and range of usage with scratch having the broader of them.
"Scritch" is used more in the American South than anywhere I know of, because the Appalachian dialect, which sounds quite similar to far older English dialects, has preserved it.