03/11/2026
Do you know what the word WEE means?
Our wee place in the Highlands has been ‘a little bit of something special’ since at least 1900 🏡😍
Didn’t know this about ‘outwith’ either.
You can take a Scot out of Scotland, but a handful of words will follow them for the rest of their life, and most of the time they do not even notice they are using them. 💬
Take outwith. To most English speakers it sounds strange, but in Scotland it is a perfectly ordinary word meaning outside or beyond, as in outwith office hours. It appears in the burgh records of Glasgow in 1701 and has been used in Scottish legal and official writing for centuries, with older forms going right back to Barbour's Bruce in 1375. It is still in council letters and university rules today.
Then there is wee, perhaps the best loved Scots word of all. It comes from an old northern word for a small amount, a weight, and Scots have been using it for a little bit of something since around 1300. A wee cup of tea, a wee minute, a wee while. It softens everything it touches. 🫖
Going for the messages means doing the food shopping, a phrase that baffles visitors. The message was an errand, and by 1788 a Scot could be out a message. A granny went to the messages with a string bag and came home with the bread, the milk and all the news.
Your pinkie is your little finger, a word linked to the Dutch pink, and the close is the entry passage of a tenement leading to the common stair, the place where children played and neighbours stood to talk. And if someone tells you not to fash yourself, they mean do not trouble yourself, from the old French fâcher, a word Scots have used since at least 1540.
These are not slang and they are not mistakes. They are the survivors of the Scots language, carried into everyday English by people who would never think of themselves as speaking anything special.
Every one of those little words is a thread back to a kitchen, a close or a playground where someone first said it to us. 💙 Which Scots word did your parents or grandparents use that you still say today?
