Bide verb to remain, stay, reside; to await; noun a visit
‘“Ah, no, sir,” Josiah said politely. “We’ll bide I think.”’ (A Breath of Snow and Ashes)
Bide, from Old English bidan, is found in Scottish and English sources dating from the Middle Ages, although now more frequently associated with Scots and some dialects of northern English.
Many of the current meanings of the word have been in use in Scotland since the late fourteenth century. One of the texts from this early period (c.1400) is John Barbour’s Legends of the Saints, and in it we find various uses of the word: ‘Thou sal stil byd here’, ‘Thou bidis & sufferis, til that we Thru repentance wil turne to the’ and ‘The clergy … byde Goddis wrake [vengeance]’.
In medieval Scots, the present participle form of the verb typically ended in ‘-and’, and a version of this, bydand, with the sense ‘abiding’ or ‘steadfast’, was taken up as the motto of the Gordon family and the Gordon Highlanders.
Bide is also found in literature from later periods, and according to James Kelly’s collection of Scottish proverbs (1721): ‘The Dee’l bides his Day’ was ‘Spoken when People demand a Debt or Wages before it be due’.
Bidin is also used to mean durable in Alexander Laing’s Wayside Flowers (1846), referring to the lasting quality of materials: ‘Hameart mak’ is best o’ wear, Thae market things they ha’e nae bidin’.’
Bide, meaning remain, was in frequent use in early twentieth-century literature. There is a nice example from Alison Taylor’s Bitter Bread (1929): ‘I’d as soon bide at home and get drunk on my ain claret’.
Bide has also evolved into bidie-in, meaning live-in significant other. However, a stooshie about this term was reported in the Daily Record (1999). A man was charged with: ‘attacking his bidie-in’, but the Sheriff refused to acknowledge the charge until the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) had been consulted. ‘Bidie-in’ wasn’t then in the OED (though it is, of course, in Scottish dictionaries and the OED added it in 2019) so the charge had to be changed. ‘But all to no avail … the case collapsed minutes later when his bidie-in - or co-habitee as she had become by then - told Kilmarnock Sherriff Court that she remembered nothing about the incident.’