Oxter noun the armpit; verb to take or support by the arm, to embrace
‘“Ye dinna want to put your head near my oxter, Sassenach. I smell like a boar that’s been dead a week.”’ (Dragonfly in Amber)
Oxters may be found wherever there are people, but the word itself is local to Scotland, northern England, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man. Frequently used in Scots, the word is often regarded as exclusively Scottish. An article in the Aberdeen Evening Express in April 2004 even suggested that a list of local Scottish icons might include ‘oxters, of all fyuchie [unpleasant] things’.
Our earliest known Scottish oxters appear in the written record in the fifteenth century. An entry in the records of Kelso Abbey dated to around 1420 describes how the heart may be cleansed of disease or infection by treatment ‘under the armys, that is in the hol of the oxteris’.
Oxter is thought to derive from Old English oxta, ohsta ‘armpit’, although its Old Norse sister form ostr may have influenced the word’s development and perhaps explains the final -r spelling. Since the late eighteenth century, a variety of verbal uses of oxter have also developed, including the sense to take, lead or support by the arm, as in Robert Burns’ entertaining description of Meg o’ the Mill’s wedding ceremony: ‘The priest he was oxter'd, the clark he was carried, And that’s how Meg o’ the Mill was married!’ But the verb can also mean to embrace, as in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s early twentieth century novel Sunset Song: ‘In the strangeness and cold and the sighing of that far-off water Chris could find no sleep till Will whispered “Let’s sleep together”. So then they did, oxtering one the other till they were real warm.’
Oxters can also be figurative as well as literal. In January 2006, the Sunday Mail noted that a new signpost now proclaims Harthill service station ‘The Heart of Scotland’. Being apprised of this knowledge, the journalist quipped, ‘If that’s the heart, where's the oxter?’ Any answers are probably best kept judiciously to yourselves.