Word of the week

• threap v. argue, contend, be disputatious; quarrel; assert
• abune, aboon, abuin, etc. adv. and prep. above, over; etc.
• abune, aboon, abuin, etc. adv. and prep. above, over; etc
• abune, aboon, abuin, etc. adv. and prep. above, over; etc.
• wee adj. small, tiny, little, restricted in size
• cranreuch n. hoar-frost
• first foot v. to be the first person to enter a house on New Year’s morning

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wee adj. small, tiny, little, restricted in size

“wee adj. small, tiny, little, restricted in size”

14th January 2008

Wee is still generally recognised as a Scots word, even though it is now commonplace in many varieties of English. This little word has quite a complex history. It derives from an Old English term for a set of scales or a weight, and is first recorded in Scots texts from the early fourteenth-century as a noun signifying a quantity or amount of something. Several other meanings were also possible during this period. Wee could denote ‘a short distance’, as in John Barbour’s poem, The Bruce (1375): ‘The Scottis archeris … Schot emang thame so sturdely (shot amongst them so resolutely) … That thai vayndist (retreated) a litell we’.

In other contexts, the word can indicate something that takes place for a short time, or to a small extent, as in this example from Sir Gilbert Hay’s fifteenth-century Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour: ‘The king smirkit ane litill wee’. As an adjective, wee is first recorded in Scots in a description of ‘the litill we wran (wren)’ in Sir Richard Holland’s fifteenth-century Book of the Howlat. It later appears in English texts including William Shakespeare’s late sixteenth-century Merry Wives of Windsor: ‘He hath but a little wee-face, with a little yellow beard’.

In current Scots, wee appears in a wheen of well-known expressions. A wee hauf is a small whisky, a wee-boukit person is small in stature, and the term wee man can denote a small or young person, or an odd-job man, though in the exclamation ‘in the name o the wee man!’ it refers to the devil. Wee ane ‘little one’, has also given us the word wean ‘child’. As both an international ambassador and an evolving Scots word, wee remains robust. Given the relentless evolution of language and culture, we may even find ourselves spelling the word ‘wii’ at some future time.