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Scots Language Centre Centre for the Scots Leid

SPAIL n. a splinter, shaving or wooden point

In modern Scots we think mainly of spails as small splinters, which could get embedded annoyingly in the skin, as in “This plank’s ower spaily for sittin on” from Perth (1950). However, in the sense of a pointed piece of wood, a spail could be considerably more deadly.  In Robert Lindsay’s The History and Cronicles of Scotland (a1578) we read of the King of France, who was “hurt in the face witht the spaill of ane speir” and even gorier, from Gavin Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid (1513): “Sum stekit throu the cost [side] with spalis of tre [wood] Lay gaspand” – as well they might.  

But most mentions of spails in the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) are more mundane, and relate to everyday items and woodworking.  So in James Kelly’s A Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs (1721) we find “He’s not the best Wright that casts the manyest Speals”.

Spails were often used to make things; we find spale-box, a small box made of thin wooden strips, and spale-basket or spale-skull, a two-handled basket similarly made and often used for potatoes. Spale-boord is plywood, as in the precarious-sounding: “To climp on the tarry ropes, and having nothing but a bit of a spale-boord between him an’ etarnity” from Gordon Fraser’s Wigtown and Whithorn: Historical and Descriptive Sketches (1877). A spale-seive was a sieve with a plywood frame. 

Finally, spail also referred to a curl or ‘shaving’ of wax appearing on a burning candle, which was commonly considered as an omen of impending death for the person it turned towards.  It was reported in the Perthshire Advertiser in 1830 that “we remember to have seen a whole company of grown up people of both sexes, turn pale at the sight of what is vulgarly called, a spael in the candle”.

 

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