Dreich adjective dreary, dank, damp
‘“Come,” he said. “We canna be standing out here, dreich as it is; we’ll catch our deaths.”’ (Written in my own Heart’s Blood)
Dreich has a variety of meanings, the best known of which describes damp, cold, wet, foggy or otherwise unappealing weather.
The word has been recorded since the fifteenth century and was first used to describe anything long-lasting, tiresome or slow. Dreich was borrowed into Scots from Middle English dregh, meaning burdensome, dismal or tedious. The early senses have endured and evolved, developing other uses related to boredom and lack of interest. In John Gillespie’s early twentieth century Humours of Scottish Life, for instance: ‘A minister on one occasion preached an unusually long and dreich sermon’.
Dreich can also be applied to dull or boring people, as here in Ian Maclaren’s story collection Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894): ‘A’ hear that they have nae examination in humour at the college; it’s an awfu’ want, for it wud keep oot mony a dreich body’.
In the eighteenth century the word developed a specific sense of slow to pay debts. ‘By and by I found MacLeerie a little dreich in settlin’ his bills, and heard that his wife was launchin’ oot in the social line wi’ regular days-at-home, progressive whist, and a vacuum-cleaner’ (Neil Munro, Fatal Clock, 1913). William Cross used it this way too in The Disruption (1846), describing a frustratingly slow wooing: ‘She’s courtin’ him briskly, but he’s unco dreigh to draw’.
Dreichness could inspire fear as well as boredom. For example, the fearsome Day of Judgement when, according to the poem Ratis Raving (c.1420), God ‘sittis heich And has a balans larg and dreich’. That balance may well weigh heavy against these clergy in the New Litany (1638) from A Book of Scotish Pasquils: ‘From typset [tipsy] preachers drunk all night, And dreich againe er day be light … deliver us’.
Finally, a lovely use of the word in Albert D Mackie’s Poems (1928): ‘And even the ugsome driech o’ this Auld clarty Yirth [Earth] is wi’ your kiss Transmogrified’.