- as in English, a court is an enclosed area, but some uses of the word are specific to Scotland. The back-court, or back-courtie, refers to the garden or yard at the back of a tenement building. In Row Laddie Sixty Years On (1987), Norman Lynn recalls the games played in such places:
Football and cricket were discouraged in the confinement of the back-coorty, so Beezy, where the ball was struck with bare hand and less likely to cause damage, was substituted.