Scots Language Centre

LOWN adj calm, sheltered; n calm weather, a sheltered spot

3 days, 3 hours ago

Although this comes from the Old Norse noun ‘logn’ meaning calm weather, it makes its earliest recorded appearance in Scots as the past participle of a verb, in John Barbour’s ...

SEMMIT n a vest

1 week, 2 days ago

Perhaps because underwear is not a fitting subject for literary discourse, the early records of this word are very sparse. The only quotation in A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue is from...

FREMMIT adj strange, unfamiliar, foreign; n a stranger

2 weeks, 3 days ago

From week to week, I try to give a mixture of fremmit and familiar words. I’d be interested to know which category you think this week’s word comes into. All the most recent quotatio...

BREARD n the first shoots; v to sprout

3 weeks, 3 days ago

The Oxford English Dictionary says of this word 'Properly Sc ... but now sometimes used by English writers: the first shoots of grass, corn, or other crops'. In Older Scots it appears in The Kni...

GEY adj considerable; adv considerably, very

on 16th Apr 2012

The Older Scots spelling ‘gay’ reveals this word’s origins. From the fourteenth century, the adjective ‘gay’ means splendid or cheerful, but in 1686 the modern sens...

Tow n a rope, card. a length of string

on 09th Apr 2012

Tow is anything from thick rope to household string. Many Dictionary quotations refer to maritime uses such as this from An Account of the Depredations committed on the Clan Campbell and their F...

Gettin yer dumps: a birthday custom

on 01st Apr 2012

The Scots word dump means a quick blow, a thump or a thud. It can be a blow on the knuckles given to the loser at marbles, but among children it is best known in the phrase ‘gettin yer dum...

BIRSE n a bristle, to bristle

on 26th Mar 2012

The Scottish National Dictionary entry for ‘birse’ starts with a puzzling saying from James Kelly’s Complete Collection of Scotish [sic] Proverbs (1721): “The Sowter gave...