Cockernonny noun the gathering of long hair; a woman’s cap with starched crown
‘“Keep still,” she ordered. She began to separate the hair into three thick strands. “I’ll make ye a proper cockernonny,” she declared with satisfaction.’ (Outlander)
Scotland has always been known for its distinctive fashion-sense, and cockernonny is part of the vocabulary of fashion. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers the earliest citation, from a ‘broadside’ (i.e. single-sheet) poem called A description of a cockernonie, which maidens will not want to make them bony (1701). This poem seems to have been published in London; however, cockernonny was considered wholly Scots by the time of John Jamieson’s ground-breaking Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language (1808), which defines it thus: ‘The gathering of a young woman's hair, when it is wrapt up in a band or fillet, commonly called a snood.’
The origin of the term is somewhat obscure. It is thought to be related to the word cocker ‘unsteady’, but perhaps it’s more likely to be a variant of the (rather unfortunate) term cockup. An early citation (1692) from the satire Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, has a stern minister say: ‘I have been this year of God preaching against the vanity of Women, yet I see my own Daughter in the Kirk even now have as high a Cockupp as any of you all.’
Allan Ramsay used it intriguingly in his version of Christ’s Kirk on the Green (1721): ‘[She] dung her Cockernonny A jee that Day’. Similarly, John Mayne’s Siller Gun (1777) has: ‘But, lang ere e’en, her cockernonny was toozl’d sair’. And George Bruce describes a rather strange ceremony in his poem ‘The Country Bridal’ (1813): ‘Now broken was the bridal bread, Owre the bride’s cockernony.’
Cockernonny’s meaning was extended later in the nineteenth century to include a kind of starched cap worn by a woman. Walter Scott uses it that way in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819): ‘Her mother … sat by the fire in the full glory of a grogram gown, lammer beads, and a clean cockernony.’
It also developed figurative meanings, such as relating to sweet buns (probably because of their shape). In Ulster, for example, it referred to haystacks. The word has, however, since disappeared, along with the hairstyle it refers to, until it re-emerged in Outlander in 1991.