Keek verb to peep, glance, pry; noun a peep, a stolen glance.
‘“He saw me turn to go, and must ha’ thought he’d outstayed his welcome, for he pulled the watch from his pocket to have a wee keek, and I saw the glint from that bittie round thing on the chain.”’ (The Fiery Cross)
Keek has been recorded in Scottish sources since the late fifteenth century and is probably a borrowing from Middle English. A fair bit of keekin goes on in William Dunbar’s poem The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c.1508), for example: ‘As the new mone [moon] … Kythis quhilis [reveals sometimes] her cleir face, through cluddis of sable, So keik I through my clokis, and castis kynd lukis To knychtis, and to clerikis, and courtly personis’.
Keekin can be a clandestine activity, or it may indicate that the keeker wishes to remain concealed. Familiar Illustrations of Scottish Character (Charles Rogers, 1861) includes the following: ‘O Lord, Thoo is like a moose in a dry-stane dyke - aye keekin’ oot at us frae holes an’ crannies, and we canna see Thee’. Being seen to keek at an auction can have unintended consequences, as noted by Thomas Manson in his Shetlandic tale Humours of a Peat Commission (1908): ‘If ye bit raise yere ee and kyke at dem [auctioneers], dey tak it fur a bid’.
There are a number of now rare compounds and phrases. One of them is keek-in-the-coag, or keek-in-the-stoup - a surreptitious investigator. These were not well thought of according to James Kelly’s Proverbs (1721): ‘Keek in the Stoup was ne’er a good Fellow.’
Keek is also used as a noun to mean a glance or look, which may be quietly furtive - as in Alan Warner’s novel Morvern Callar (1995): ‘I plucked up courage to take a keek ... Lanna and the two disciples were bare on the bed’. In other instances, though, no secrecy is involved, and the eyes are not necessarily prying. For example, the Sunday Herald in November 2006 reported this about a genealogy website ‘allowing free keeks at the passenger lists of ships which took Scottish emigrants to the Americas over the centuries’.