Essential English-Scots Dictionary

In this section you will find helpful points for using Scots and this dictionary in an education setting. Depending on the age of your learners, these may be useful for discussion amongst the pupils themselves or just as part of your professional development and conversations with colleagues.

As Scots is a language which has often been under threat or stigmatised, sources such as dictionaries like this can be both immensely helpful, as well as tricky and open-ended. Scots has never been standardised. This allows for much freedom when using the language in a learning environment, particularly in creative writing lessons. But it becomes tricky if looking for one correct answer. When teaching a new language to young learners, or those with little or no prior experience of the language, looking up a simple word like ‘child’ or ‘small’ and being given multiple, equally correct answers, can cause confusion. 

Those with a good understanding of many languages can step easily into this understanding, but that will not always be the case in the classroom. The fact that Scots has not been officially recognised, even within Scotland, throughout centuries of being a language spoken by the people, means that different parts of the country have dialects which can be distinct from one another, with words that are equally valid and correct within that area. 

Resources created by the Dictionaries of the Scots Language will give you the place where particular Scots words originate from and where they are commonly used. In this dictionary, you will be given the English word in bold, which part of speech it is in italics, then the Scots translations, together with where that Scots word comes from IN CAPITALS.

Being able to search for the Scots translation of an English word is an incredibly useful resource. As with any translation tool, it is excellent for looking up one word at a time, rather than trying to build full sentences. And just like when learning any language, all prior knowledge will be useful when interpreting the answers the Dictionary gives you. 

A tool such as this, which can give you a wealth of information for even simple searches, can be incredibly helpful and inspiring, but always needs a note of caution. Learners of any age will need to know about different dialects of Scots language to understand the information in the dictionary. And this is not unique to school classrooms or learners at any stage of their Scots language journey. One of the most prominent academics on the Scots language is Robert McColl Millar. Here is an excerpt from his book Modern Scots: An Analytical Survey, which you may be interested to read:

“A few months ago my eight-year-old daughter said that something she was doing was a bit of a ficher / ‘something that is difficult to do, a hassle, fiddly’. This pleased me greatly because it was a sign she was picking up local, South Northern, words at school. Because I speak a West Central dialect, I would not use this word (although living in the North-East means that I know the word well); I would use fouterin its place (a word that people in Northern dialect areas would know and use). These differences can be multiplied, naturally: where I say lassie for ‘girl, young woman’, people in the North-East say quine. I call any fizzy drink ginger when at least older people in the North-East say, surprisingly, ale. More globally, westerners like me along with Ulster people (including some native speakers of Ulster English) call a child a wean, while people from the rest of Scotland generally use bairn (although little eens ‘little ones’ is common in the North-East). People from the Northern Isles and to an extent Caithness prefer peedie or peerie for ‘small’, while all other Scots speakers prefer wee (this distinction is to a degree more complex than this, but this is the essential distribution).” p104-105.

A feature of the Scots language, which has been seen by many as a jewel in its crown, is its variety and the fascinating details which can be found when learning more about how the language changes across different parts of Scotland. Examples of this can be found in academic texts like those of Robert McColl Millar, books celebrating the language such as The Mither Tongue by Billy Kay, as well as literature, particularly the poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, where he not only put words from different dialects alongside one another, but also words from across different centuries of the language as it has been spoken.

Age restrictions

Care has been taken to ensure the contents of this dictionary are generally appropriate for school children, but teachers should exercise their judgement with regard to pupils aged 9-12.

Further Resources on Dialects of Scots:

There are education resources available to help you, such as: 100 key Scots words | Resources | Education Scotland This resource features 100 key words in varieties of Scots from the different dialect areas. These lists of Scots words, phrases and grammatical features are particularly useful for illustrating the similarities and differences between varieties of Scots.

Scots Language Centre Dialects page: Dialects (scotslanguage.com) and Education material page which features many resources broken down into dialect specific lessons: Education (scotslanguage.com).