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Learning in Literature

hunner, hunder num. (one) hundred; hundredth

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“hunner, hunder num. (one) hundred; hundredth”

29th May 2007

Hunner seemed an appropriate word for this week, given that this article brings my total of Scots words of the week to exactly that number. Avid readers of the Dictionary of the Scots Language will note that hunner has a wide range of specific senses, from terms used in weaving to a unit of land rented for growing cabbages or kail. The long-metre version of the 100th psalm in the Scottish Psalter is also known as the Auld Hunder, as in the following from J. B. Salmond's My Man Sandy (1899): "He ... stack in till the Auld Hunder like the Jook o' Wellinton at the battle o' Waterloo".

The word can be found in Scottish texts from the late fourteenth century onwards and is related to Old English hundred, from which the modern English form derives. One of the regular features of Scots grammar is that plural numbers are often used with singular forms of its noun, and this can be traced right back to examples like "fyve hundyr men" in John Barbour's fourteenth-century poem, The Bruce, and "twa hundyr mark of sterlyngys" in the Memorials of the Family of Wemyss in 1389. The same construction is found in modern Scots, as in Alan Warner's novel The Sopranos (1998): "A taxi can make a hunner pound in an hour".

Hunner, or lang hunner is used to denote a number of sheep, fish, plants and so forth, and is often equated with a hundred and twenty, or six score, although the exact figure may vary. The word and its variants have also appeared in a number of plant-names, such as hundred-fald for lady's bedstraw, hunirt-leaft girss for yarrow, and hunder-leafed rose for the peony. However, our evidence for these words is somewhat patchy and dated, so we would be delighted to hear from anyone who still knows or uses these terms.