Derived originally from Germanic and reaching us via middle English, kythe now remains only in Scots.  It is often used in the sense of outwardly manifesting some inner aspect of oneself, whether deliberately or otherwise.

Its earliest attestation in the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) is from John Barbour's Legends of the Saints (1380): “For to kyth the gret grace That in hyme ay habundand was”. It could also apply to demonstrating a skill, as in this quotation from W. Mure's Dido and Aeneas (1614): “Some grave in brasse; sum kyth their craft in stone”. The qualities revealed were not always good ones however, as illustrated by this 1608 extract from Letters and State Papers during the Reign of King James the Sixth, ed. J. Maidment: “Kything the malice of my hart by the vttering of onreverent speiches”. And in Burns's poem Halloween (1787) we read that “Their faces blythe fu' sweetly kythe Hearts leal, an' warm, an' kin”, which conjures up a heartwarming scene.

Kythe can also apply to material objects as well as qualites or attributes, meaning to appear or become visible. For example, again from Barbour's Legends of the Saints (1380): “The mone sa clerly kyde That he al that euir scho dyd Saw”. In another weather-related context, kythe applied to the sky can also mean to appear more clearly or brighten, as in “His eye caught something movan' on the hillside atween him an' the kythan' sky” from John G Michie's Deeside Tales (1872).

Finally, in fishing parlance, kithing or keething can refer to the circles which betray the movements of a fish in the water, as explained this extract from the Court of Session papers for 1796: “They wrought that shot by sinking their nets when they saw fish in it, and they would have seen them by keethings…”.

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