- sleet. The Vatter of Tay be veittis and sleit vaxit so great. . .(The Chronicle of Perth 1615 ed. James Maidment 1831). This Older Scots example shows one of the eccentricities of Scots scribes. There was a lot of interchange in the use of w, v and u. In seventeenth-century England, u was regularly kept for the middle of words like moue [move] and house, v was used at the start of words like vp (up) and vine and w was used pretty much wherever you might expect it to be. Such spelling conventions did not catch on to the same extent with Scots scribes and they made liberal and erratic use of w into the bargain, causing much greater variation in Scots manuscripts than in English manuscripts of the same period. So from this quotation we deduce that the Water of Tay waxed by wet weather and sleet.
The next quotation manages to encapsulate the cutting pain sleet can inflict on bare skin when driven by the wind: Scharpe soppys [densely packed masses] of sleit (Gavin Douglas Aeneid (Prologue) 1513).