The Dictionary of the Scots Languagehttp://www.dsl.ac.uk defines a ‘spence’ as: “An inner apartment of a house, a parlour variously used as a sitting room, small bedroom, breakfast room, larder or store-room for provisions or domestic equipment”. As a child I remember my grandmother, who originally hailed from Renfrewshire, talking about the ‘spence’ meaning the living room but the ‘spence room’ meant the pantry. However, according to DSL this was obsolescent by the early twentieth century but my grandmother was using it well into the second half of the twentieth century. 

In English the earliest meanings are only that of a store cupboard or pantry and the first example in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale: “Fat as a whale, and walking as a swan; Al vinolent [given to drunkeness] as Botel in the spence.” (c1386).

In Scots the first clear example meaning a specific room comes from The Correspondence of the Reverend Robert Woodrow: “[She] went to the spense to prayer” (1707). The final ‘current’ example comes from Edinburgh in 1928: “The hoose is braw — the lobby [entrance hall] uncae [unusually] swell, The spence adorned wi’ nackets, curtains, fern”, from In Two Tongues by A D Mackie. Given its survival into the late twentieth century it has perhaps further survived into the twenty first and indicates that further research is required.

It comes ultimately from Older French ‘despense’ with influence from Old French ‘espense’ expenditure.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language Dictionaries