The core meaning of leck, or lake, is leak, and the older examples in the Dictionary of the  Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) reflect this, referring specifically to leaky ships.  For example, in Gavin Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1513), he refers to “The sewit [fastened] barge, Sa ful of ryftys and with lekkis perbrake [broken]”.  And in an otherwise English sentence, Samuel Rutherford in a letter written in 1660 says “If there be a hole in it, so that it take in water at a leck, it will with difficulty mend again”.

Later, the meaning expanded to encompass other leak-related things.  One example is a vessel in which bark for tanning is steeped; this meaning is clearly explained by John Jamieson in the 1887 supplement to his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language: “It [a leck] is so called because the liquor leaks or filters from it into a side-chamber called the lekee; and from this well it is drawn off to the tan-pits”.  In a similar vein, a leck can be a round board of the same diameter as the vessel placed on top of a cheese in a cheese-vat, through which the whey leaks.

A laky tide is the name given to a phenomenon which occurs in the upper part of the Firth of Forth, which seems to lose water – i.e. leak - temporarily before a full tide and to gain it before the ebb tide.  This is referred to in the the Statistical Account of Scotland (1790s): “This is what the sailors call a leaky tide, which happens always in good weather during the neap tides”.

Of rain, leck means to fall intermittently, to pass in occasional showers, especially in the adjective forms laikin or laky, meaning showery as opposed to continuously raining. 

Scots Word of the Week is written by Ann Ferguson of Scottish Language Dictionaries www.scotsdictionaries.org.uk, 9 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh EH3 7AL,  mail@scotsdictionaries.org.uk. For £20 you can sponsor a Scots word.