Trull noun a foolish person, a person of low morals
‘I rounded on Mrs Chisholm with fire in my eye. She shrank back, dropping the broom. “Ha! Ye pert trull! You and …” - Mrs Bug’s shrill cries behind me were suddenly silenced …’ (The Fiery Cross)
Trull in Scots actually has many meanings. For instance, trull is cited as a form of trow, along with trowe, trool and trowl. These forms can be verbs, meaning ‘to roll (over)’ or ‘spin round’, as in this citation from 1813: ‘Blabs o’ sweat, baith large and cawl, Trull’d owre his face’. Sir Walter Scott, in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), offers a simile: ‘like a stane trowling down hill’.
It can also mean ‘to walk with a rolling gait’, as in this example from 1992: ‘There were women wi bairns in prams, loons and lassies trowing fae the school, a puckle o teachers and retired men o worth, and in the van the campers’. As a noun, possible meanings of this group of forms include ‘any long unshapely thing which trails on the ground’, ‘the playing of a marble by rolling it’ and even ‘the dung of horses, cows, and man’.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language’s main entry for trull is brief: ‘Derivative trullion. A foolish person, a silly creature’. The 1825 edition of John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language indicates that the usage is found in Ayrshire. And the etymology suggested is ‘appar[ently] a local usage of Eng[lish] trull, a strumpet, trollop’. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites forms from the sixteenth century onwards, offering comparisons with ‘German regional Trulle (also Drolle) unattractive, overweight, or poorly dressed woman … prostitute (eighteenth century or earlier)’.
There was a more neutral sixteenth-century meaning (girl), the most recent citation of this came from the collection Englands Helicon (around 1600). However, citations with the interpretation ‘female prostitute’ date from 1516 onwards, including from Jonathan Swift’s characteristically misanthropic Proposal for Giving Badges to Beggars (1737): ‘He and his Trull, and Litter of Brats’. Even though both the word and its negative meaning are flagged as ‘Now somewhat rare’, OED has an example from as recently as 1984. The Scots form appears to differ in meaning from English usages in that (in Scots) a trull can be both male and female.