Wifie noun a woman
‘“Where did ye get that wee auld wifie?” he asked … “Mrs Bug,” I replied. “She says it’s a fertility charm …”.’ (The Fiery Cross)
A number of features of Scots were once shared with English but, where English has changed, Scots may retain an earlier form or sense. Wif was the general Old English word for a woman, married or otherwise.
In Scots, a wife or wifie can denote a married woman but also retains the earlier sense of ‘a female person’ that wif had in Old English, as this exchange in John Buchan’s Free Fishers (1934) shows: “‘He is tied to the petticoat tails of a daft wife.” “A wife! He is married then?” “No, no. There’s no marriage. I used our vernacular term for the other sex when we would speak of it without respect.”’
Wifie is the commonest diminutive form of wife, but we also find wifock and others. ‘Buchan folk possess an absolute genius for diminutives, managing to turn semantics into gymnastics with examples such as “Little wee bit wifikie”’. (Jack Webster, Another Grain of Truth, 1989)
It is not an easy word to pin down. In The Gude and Godlie Ballatis (1567) we read of ‘Heliogabalus, Quhais (whose) lyfe in lust was spent ... Defyling maide and wyfe’, which could suggest wifie here meant a mature or experienced woman.
Certainly, modern usage often refers to middle-aged or older women and sometimes carries a slightly disparaging tone, but ‘wee wifie’ can be a term of endearment for a little girl. An ‘auld wifie’ or a ‘sweetie wifie’, though, is usually describing a gossipy person of either gender.
Lesser-known meanings include the edible female crab, Cancer pagurus, and a fragment of burning wick from a candle, thought to be a presage of marriage. The latter is illustrated by a quotation from John Galt’s Stanley Buxton (1832): ‘A wife, as the bachelors say, having fallen from the wick of the candle, burned the body [of the candle] with great precipitation’.
The word can also denote a female in a role usually thought of as exclusively male, as in this from the Press and Journal of 30 March 1970: ‘Yon’s Craig Castle fa the wifie Laird bides.’
Finally, we like to think that The James Carmichael Collection of Proverbs (about 1628) pays a prophetic tribute to the role of women in modern Scottish lexicography: ‘Quhair there is wyves, there are there words’.