Word of the week

• dominie n. a schoolmaster, teacher
• scribe n. a crab-apple
• tume adj. empty; unoccupied, vacant, etc.
• kythe v. show, reveal, become manifest; take after, resemble
• dwam n. a daydream; a stupor; a swoon

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tume adj. empty; unoccupied, vacant, etc.

“tume adj. empty; unoccupied, vacant, etc.”

16th October 2007

Tume is derived from two closely-related Old Norse and Old English words of similar form and meaning. It was in use in England until about the fifteenth century, but has since become restricted to northern dialects. As a noun, verb and adjective, the Scots word is attested from the Middle Ages until the modern day, and its various regional pronunciations have given rise to such diverse spellings as toom, teem, taim and tim.

Some of the first recorded uses of tume appear in the early fifteenth-century Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, by Androw of Wyntoun. One passage describes how John Balliol, King of Scotland from 1292-96, came by the nickname of Toom Tabard (literally "empty cloak"). When he abdicated, Balliol was divested of all regal attire: "The pellour (fur) thai tuk out of his tabart, Tuyme Tabart he was callit eftirwart; And al othir insignyis (insignia) ... baith septure, suerde (sword), crowne and rynge ... fra hym he tuk".

Modern literary uses include the following from Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Cloud Howe (1933): "every kirk in the Howe grew toom, a minister would sometimes rise of a Sunday and preach to a congregation of ten, in a bigging builded to hold two hundred". And in Matthew Fitt's But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000) we read: "the crack wis aw aboot Pherson's een. The medics sayin there wis naethin in them. Blin. Toom. The life an colour aw slippit oot".

Instances of tume (and its variants) are rare in modern newspapers. One, from The Herald in 1991, illustrates our word in a phrase associated with "a sook, a groveller, or a pee-hee. 'He tims the foreman's po,' his workmates would say". But the last word goes to Dr James Begg, in a letter to The Herald in 1996: "Oor language in its leevin diversity still hauds on tae mair o the nation's history than aa oor tuim castles pit thegither".