Braw adjective very good, excellent, handsome, splendid, brave
‘“Ye did a braw bit o’ work tonight, lass. I was proud of ye.”’ (Outlander)
Braw developed from a variant of the word brave, itself borrowed into Scots and English from French. Early uses of braw, noted in Scottish sources in the seventeenth century, often relate to physical beauty, such as the ‘cumlie yowth of braw statour [build]’ described in A Chronicle of the Kings of Scotland (c 1615).
A more proverbial usage is found in Robert Pitcairn’s account of Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland (1833): ‘the Devill wold giv us the brawest lyk money that ewer wes coyned’. This sense continues to be represented in later literature, as in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Old Mortality (1816): ‘Ye think yoursell a braw fellow enow; and troth … there’s na fault to find wi’ the outside’. Another of Scott’s novels, Heart of Midlothian (1818), illustrates the use of the plural, which developed from the same word: ‘But, Madge, the lads only like ye when ye hae on your braws [finery]’.
There’s an amusing image using the meaning of great or big from Anna Blair’s Scottish Tales (1987): ‘As the braw straggle skirled their way to the outskirts of the town, the Sheriff’s men, leaning from an upstairs window, dropped plaids on the company and took a handful of them in a blind fankle of wool and fringe.’ You can just see them blind-punching their way out of the tartan. She also provides an example of braw meaning good or fine in The Rowan on the Ridge (1980): ‘“That’s braw stuff!” he pronounced as a fine French brandy trickled down his gullet.’
And sticking with a drinking theme, the sense of good man or good fellow appears in J Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1827): ‘Peter, my braw man … bring but a bottle o’ Primrose wine.’
Examples of Scots texts that include the word braw can also be found on the website of the Scottish Parliament. One, entitled ‘Makkin yer voice heard in the Scottish Pairlament’, includes the following: ‘The Visitor Centre has braw visual an interactive displays that lats ye explore information anent the Pairlament at yer ain raik [speed]’.