Tocher, which is derived from Gaelic, has been around for a long time.  The earliest reference to it in the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) is from a charter dated 1469: “The said William Preston sal give in tochir … the soume of sex hundrith markis”.  And over five hundred years later, we read in Matthew Fitt’s Pure Radge (1996): “an juist whit/ in the nemm o the wee man/ did ye dae tae the horse/ ma best brawest cuddie, puir meg/ that wis the tocher aff ma ain faither”.

The phrase in tocher, meaning ‘as a dowry’, is illustrated in this quotation from Sir Robert Sibbald’s The History and Description of Fife (1803): “He married Ada … and got with her in tocher the lands of Strathmiglo, Falkland”.

Tocher also appears in various dowry-related compounds, such as tocher band, a marriage settlement, as used by Burns in The Gallant Weaver (1792): “My daddie sign’d my tocher-band To gie the lad that has the land”, and tocher-fee, with the same meaning. Tocher gear or tocher gude referred to property given as a dowry, as referred to in Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1818): “That part of your father’s spoils which he may be prevailed upon to disgorge by way of tocher good”. 

There is also the self-explanatory tocherless, as in the somewhat gloomy “She that’s tocherless, neglected lies” from Andrew Shirrefs’ Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1790), and the similarly pessimistic “Faith, at the manse, an orphan and tocherless, had so few offers”, from Joseph Tennant’s Jeannie Jaffray (1909).  However, to be tocherless wasn’t always a disadvantage; in S R Crockett’s The Raiders, one character “married a lass … who brought him no tocher, but, what was better, a strong dower of sense and good health”.

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