- close, humid. Mochy is pronounced with the ch representing the throaty Scots sound as described for dreich. Like dreich, this word can have a range of meanings, but mochy invariably implies a high level of humidity. It is perhaps most often used to capture in a single word the feeling of damp, close, muggy, misty and oppressive weather. An Argyllshire quotation from the English Dialect Dictionary seems to suggest an early date for the word: I’ the time o’ the Flood the deil gaed sailin’ by the Ark on a barn-door, an’ said, “It’s a mochy mornin, mester Noah”. However, the earliest recorded use actually comes from Gavin Douglas in his Aeneid of 1513 where he refers to ‘moich hailsum stovys’ (damp health-giving vapours).
The early Scottish lexicographer, John Jamieson (1825) observes ‘that mochy is not applied to mist indiscriminately; but to that only which is produced by great heat, or an accompaniment of it, when the air is so close as to affect the organs of respiration’. However, ‘great heat’ is relative and can refer both to the thundery heat of summer or to unseasonable warmth in winter, accompanied by high humidity.
Mochy can also be used to describe the condition of corn or other foodstuffs which have been spoilt by damp and heat and, as this quotation from the Aberdeen Evening Express (8 Oct. 1998) about a stench in a block of flats shows, it can even refer to smell: It’s a vile, mochy smell like something is rotting.
So, the next clammy, dreepin day that comes along, when your oxters [armpits] feel or smell a bit mochy, you have just the word you need.