Thrang adj busy

Thrang originates in an Old Norse word ‘throngr’, meaning narrow or crowded, the sense demonstrated in 1682 in Curiosities of a Scots Charta Chest, edited by Margaret Forbes and Alexander Dick: “We were so throng we had no room to stand”. In a 1633 quotation from the Memoirs of the Maxwells of Pollok, ‘crowded’ and ‘busy’ overlap: “Ther ar many people in the towne alreddie ... so that the ludgings ar verie thrang”. The ideas of overcrowding and busyness were applied to mental activity in the respectfully entitled The Works of the Pious, Reverend and Learn’d Mr. Hugh Binning, (1653): “How throng are men’s minds with their vanities”. In the Supplement to the Dictionary of the Decisions of the Court of Session, edited by M. P. Brown, a 1671 entry reads: “If the session sit down on the 1st of October then ye call in the lieges to Edinburgh in one of the throngest months of harvest that they have”. Here ‘busiest’ is the intended sense, as Burns used it of his Twa Dugs that “werena thrang at hame”. A final extension of meaning gives ‘on intimate terms with’, as in Sarah Tytler’s Mrs Carmichael's Goddesses (1898): “the maid was thrang with Harry Wedderburn”.
It is clear from the earlier senses that thrang is related to the English noun throng and the Scots noun thrang. There is also an old-fashioned English adjective used in the sense of ‘crowded’, but examples in the Oxford English Dictionary of throng or thrang meaning ‘busy’ are almost all from Scottish sources. It is one of many examples where words from the same source diverge in the two languages. Here is the noun, in a pithy comment on maintaining a life-work balance, from Ramsay’s collection of proverbs (1736). Do you ever feel that “Ye canna get leave to thrive for thrang”?

This article was written by Chris Robinson of Scots Language Dictionaries. www.scotsdictionaries.org.uk


This week's word is spoken by Gordon, a retired accountant from Aberdeenshire.