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Scots Language Centre Centre for the Scots Leid

Lowie n. money, cash

Lowie is a word that has come into Scots from Scottish Travellers and gypsy language and it has a very small entry in the Dictionary of the Scots Language ( HYPERLINK "http://www.dsl.ac.uk" www.dsl.ac.uk). It has only two citations and no examples are included. The citations tell us that lowie is mentioned in Andrew McCormack’s Tinkler Gypsies of Galloway (1907) and also in the Roxburgh Wordbook by George Watson and published in 1923. Kirk Yetholm village in Roxburghshire was for centuries the headquarters of Scottish Gypsies. 

 

However, since then the research here at Scottish Language Dictionaries has shown that it is still current as in this example from Traveller writer Jess Smith in her autobiographical Jessie’s Journey (2002): “Mammy couldn't have been any more excited if you'd given her all the lowy (money/fortune) in America!” 

 

Other Traveller writers have attested the word as far north as Aberdeen and also in Perthshire – both areas known for their strong Traveller communities.

 

Lowie has also been attested by informants from Edinburgh one who was a child in the 1960s and 70s recalling: “oh aye, we aye talked aboot lowie but it was always coin not paper money” and an example, also from Edinburgh, from Scottish Language Dictionaries’ Word Collection: “That big laddie tried tae take ma dinner lowie.” (1993). What is unclear to researchers is why there seems to so much borrowing between Edinburgh schoolchildren and Borders gypsies.

 

The etymology is obscure, as is the case with many gypsy words but its origins are Romany and it is perhaps derived from Germano-Hungarian gypsy language ‘löwe, lowe’ money.

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