Wean noun a child
‘Mr Campbell returned the stare. “I have a wife at home, sir,” he said dryly, “and eight weans, the eldest of whom is perhaps a few years older than yourself.”’ (Drums of Autumn)
Wean (to rhyme with Dwayne) is a well-known Scots word. Thanks to several different wean-related businesses coming up with the same pun on the title of an American film, visitors to the Meadow Centre in Dumbarton can let their young offspring frolic in the ‘Weans World’ play area, parents in Rutherglen can enlist the services of Weans World Afterschool Care Ltd, and children’s clothes can be purchased in the Glasgow shop ‘Weans World’.
Our first record comes from the seventeenth century and appears in Leadhills-born poet Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd (1725): ‘Troth, my Niece is a right dainty we’an’. Wean is a reduced form of ‘wee ane’ (or ‘wee yin’ depending on the dialect), literally meaning ‘little one’.
These days, many Scottish people who know the word will not necessarily choose to use it in all contexts. Scots words, being more often spoken than written, are frequently associated with informality; many of us who say ‘wean’ will write ‘child’. However, Glasgow authors John and Willy Maley invoked its informality in writing to great effect, describing a fair in From The Calton To Catalonia (1990): ‘Picture it. The Calton. Fair Fortnight. 1937. Full of Eastern promise. Wimmen windae hingin. Weans greetin for pokey hats [ice-cream cones]. Grown men, well intae their hungry thirties, slouchin at coarners, skint as a bairn’s knees.’
A much less skint bairn is described in the story entitled Carnegie's Wee Lassie. Here Neil Munro wrote: ‘It’s a gey hard thing, whiles, bein’ a millionaire’s only wean. She canna hae mony wee lassies like hersel’ to play the peever wi’, or lift things oot o’ the stanks o’ Skibo Castle wi’ a bit o’ clye and a string’. No concerns about informality there! Nor indeed in the following from Anne Donovan’s novel Buddha Da (2003), where the formal, the informal and the cross-cultural are amalgamated in modern Scots: ‘Whit on earth are these folk gonnae think when you turn up and tell them their wean’s the new Dalai Lama?’