Hoose noun house
‘“They’re no to hame, sir … and the hoose is dark, no fire in the hearth. Wherever might they go, this time o’ night?”’ (A Breath of Snow and Ashes)
There are two possible meanings in Scots for hoose. One is ‘A disease in cattle which produces a dry wheezy cough’ … but that isn’t what most Scots-speakers understand by hoose. The second meaning (house) is much more common, as in this example from Liz Lochhead’s rendering of Molière’s Tartuffe (1985):
‘Get out ma house.’
‘Whose hoose? It’s ma hoose, Ah’ll mind ye o’ it.’
Hoose can also refer to an apartment within a block or tenement. Here’s another Lochhead example (Bagpipe Muzak, 1991): ‘When me, him and the weans got a hoose o' wur ain In a four-in-a-block in this scheme. ‘
Hoose combines with other words in some imaginative ways. For some reason, many of our citations come from Orkney and Shetland: hoose-a-gate ‘gossiping from door to door’; geng hoosmylla, ‘to go from house to house gathering news or gossip’; husfolk ‘inhabitants of a house’; hoosavel ‘the field nearest the house’; hushad ‘housekeeping’… Compounds in current use beyond the Northern Isles include hoose-en(d) (the end or gable of a house), also used figuratively for ‘a stout or heavily-built woman’. And hoose-hicht (the height of a house) can be used ‘ironically of a person of small stature’, or (as an adverb or adjective) to mean ‘in a state of great excitement or anger, “sky-high”’.
Hoose derives from the Old English hūs but retains the monophthong (as opposed to the diphthong in general English pronunciation). In the south and midlands of England - along with other related developments - diphthongs arose not only in words like life, ride, write, but also in cow, mouth, down. However, in Scots and northern English only the first group was affected, meaning that in Scots ‘cow’ remains coo, ‘mouth’ is mooth, and ‘down’ is doon (compare Old English cū, mūþ, dūn). Hoose belongs to this second group; and now you can account for The Broons (compare ‘Brown’)!