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Scots Language Centre Centre for the Scots Leid

WIMPLE n a twist, turn, coil

The earliest example of wimple in the online Dictionary of the Scots Language, meaning a veil or piece of cloth coiled around the head, dates from the 14th century: “His face with thi wempill bundyn” (John Barbour's Legends of the Saints, 1380), and there are examples of the same sense in Gavin Douglas's translation of Virgil's Aeneid (1513) such as: “[She] with hir wympil wipyt the blude away”. The meaning also extends to things other than cloth, as in the following somewhat gruesome quotation about being attacked by serpents, also from Douglas's translation of Virgil's Aeneid: “Thai about hym lowpit in wympillis threw And twys cyrkyllit his myddil rownd about”.

A wimple can also be a twist or turn in general, as in “He had as mony links and whimples in his tail as an eel” from James Hogg's The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818) or, more figuratively, can refer to a ripple or rippling sound, as in “Nae music, exceptin' the clear burnie's wimple” from William Watt's Poems, on Sacred and other Subjects (1860).

A twist can become a tangle, either of material objects or of more abstract ideas.  In the Kilmarnock Mirror of 1819, we read about “a lang farrago o' whigmeleerie wimples on ae word”, and Sir Walter Scott in The Heart of Midlothian (1818) states that: “There is aye a wimple in a lawyer's clew [a ball of yarn]”.

From there the tangle becomes deliberate; a wimple can be a ruse, a wile or a piece of trickery.  In Sir Archibald Johnston's Diary (1638), wimples are listed along with “crooks” and “wyles” and contrasted with “sinceritie, uprightnes, and aifaldnes”, and the word provides a satisfying rhyme in James Maidment's A Book of Scottish Pasquils (1704): “Hugh and David Dalrymple's, Who plague the whole nation with your damn'd tricks and whimples”.


Scots Word of the Week is written by Ann Ferguson of Scottish Language Dictionaries