Orts noun leavings, left-overs, scraps; verb to reject, to throw away
‘A flask of water and a plate of bread, hard and tinged with blue mold … orts and bits of gluey, half-chewed bread covered the floor nearby.’ (The Fiery Cross)
Orts is a word shared with English of northern European/Germanic origin, meaning fodder, remains or scraps. Shakespeare, for example, uses it to mean scrap in Timon of Athens (1623): ‘It is some poore Fragment, some slender Ort of his remainder.’
And Hew Ainslie no doubt sniffed out the ‘depository for fish offal, and other orts of the town’ which he recorded in his Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns (1822), though in the same work he also used the word to describe the worst of worthless men: ‘Whaur will I find this Andro Keir, The orts o’ lawless men?’
Where ort appears to diverge from English is in its usage as a verb. In this case, it denotes wastefulness through inefficiency, for example: ‘He’s ortan in it like an ox in an oot-dyke.’ (A 1929 Orkney usage.)
As a verb, ort can also mean to reject, or not, as the case may be. The Dictionaries of the Scots Language record this usage. ‘The lasses nowadays ort nane of God’s creatures’, an old saying that signifies ‘that in our times young women are by no means nice [picky] in their choice of husbands.’
In a similar vein, there are examples of ort used to mean a form of selection. The Laird of Logan: being anecdotes and tales illustrative of the wit of Scotland (1868) records this: ‘“Ort the man’s dochters;” a saw, signifying to make Jacob’s selection in the order of a family - to pass the elder, and marry the younger.’ Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808) records that meaning too. ‘When a father gives away any of his daughters in marriage, without regard to the order of seniority, he is said to “ort his dochters”’.
Finally, The Wyse-Sayin’s O’ Solomon: The Proverbs (Paterson, 1916) gives this version of Proverbs 17:3 and uses orts here to mean refining away the dross: ‘There’s a pat for takin the orts oot o’ siller, An’ a scowtherin [scalding] bleeze [blaze] for the gowd [gold]; But it’s the Lord, nane the less, wha haunles the hairts o’ men.’