Dictionary Of The Older Scottish Tongue

Working With Older Scottish Words Is Messier Than You Think

The Dictionary Of The Older Scottish Tongue is the definitive historical dictionary of Scots, covering the period from the 14th century up to 1900. It is a joint project of the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish Language Dictionaries, and it is still ongoing — not all planned entries have been published yet. The online version at doseat.ac.uk is freely accessible, which is about as good as it gets for anyone doing serious research into Scots texts. I spent a few weeks last year trying to pin down the etymology of a particular form of the word birkie that kept turning up in an early 17th-century legal record from the Shetland Islands. The online entry pointed me toward Middle English sources, but the citation examples were too broad. I eventually had to cross-reference the Supplement to the DOS volume, which came out in 2012, just to find a relevant citation from Orkney that nailed the specific regional spelling variant I was looking for. That supplemental volume is worth grabbing whether you are doing casual research or academic work, because it contains dozens of entries that were never in the main print run.

Dictionary Of The Older Scottish Tongue

Accessing the dictionary itself is straightforward. Go to doseat.ac.uk and use the search function. You can search by headword, by citation, or by area of Scotland. The citation search is where most people get tripped up. It does not work like a regular full-text search. You need to know the document reference or the source abbreviation first. If you only have a fragment of a quote, the search will return almost nothing useful. I learned that the hard way when I tried to look up a passage from the Regiam Majestatem manuscripts without knowing the standard abbreviated source references used by the dictionary editors. I ended up spending about two hours reading through three different bibliography entries before I figured out the correct citation format the system was expecting. One thing the website does not make obvious is that many entries have appendix sections at the bottom. These are not separate entries. They are editorial notes on disputed headwords, cross-references to related forms, and sometimes entire alternative spellings that the main entry does not list. I regularly see people miss these because they stop reading after the main definition block. The appendix material is where you find the actual philological arguments about a word's origins, which is often more useful than the definition itself. The dictionary organizes entries by headword, not by meaning or by text. This means if you are looking for all uses of a particular concept across multiple sources, you are going to have to search manually. There is no concept index. I have seen graduate students waste entire semesters on exactly this mistake, thinking the dictionary would surface every occurrence of a theme like "maritime trade" or "ecclesiastical hierarchy." It will not. You have to find the relevant headwords yourself, then pull the citations from each entry.

Another common pitfall involves the dating system. The DOSAT dates its citations in relative terms — circa, before, after — and the electronic interface does not always render these clearly. When I was compiling a corpus of late 15th-century merchant correspondence, I pulled a batch of citations that turned out to span roughly seventy years once I checked the original document dates against the dictionary's estimates. That range is fine for general lexical research, but it is useless if you are doing anything time-sensitive, like tracking the emergence of a specific grammatical construction during a particular decade. In those cases, you need to go back to the original sources, which are usually available through the National Records of Scotland or the University of Edinburgh's digital collections. The pronunciation guide in the DOSAT is another area where people make assumptions. The dictionary does not provide phonetic transcriptions in the modern linguistic sense. It gives etymological notes and sometimes spelling variants that suggest how a word might have been pronounced, but it does not commit to a single reconstruction. If you need actual phonological data, you should be looking at the Scottish Historical Review or the work of researchers like Richard Cox, who has published extensively on the sound changes recorded in Scots texts. There is also the question of the dictionary's coverage boundaries. It stops at 1900, which sounds generous until you realize that a lot of Scots vocabulary that people assume is "traditional" actually entered the language after that cutoff date. The Dominie's Dictionary of North-East Scottish Dialects and the Scots Language Society publications cover the later period, but they are separate projects with different editorial standards. If you are researching a word that first appears in an 1820s textile manual, the DOSAT will not help you. You will need to switch to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, which is the living continuation of the DOSAT project and covers the period from 1900 to the present day. The two resources are connected but not seamlessly integrated. You will have to navigate them separately.

The print edition of the DOSAT ran to fifteen volumes and cost a fortune. Most universities have it in their reference sections, but individual researchers rarely buy it unless they are heavily invested in the field. The online version covers roughly the same ground for free, though it is missing some of the deeper apparatus that appeared in the print supplements. The key supplement volumes — numbers one through six — are available as PDF downloads from the Scottish Language Dictionaries website if you need the full bibliographic references and manuscript notes that the online version summarizes. What I find most frustrating about working with this resource is how uneven the entry quality is. Some entries are meticulously researched with dozens of citations spanning five centuries. Others are thin, containing just a definition and two or three examples. This reflects the reality of compiling a historical dictionary over a period of decades with limited funding, but it still bites you in practice. When I was working on a paper about Scottish legal terminology in the 16th century, roughly a third of the headwords I needed had minimal entries, and I had to spend additional time tracking down the underlying manuscripts myself. It is not the dictionary's fault. It is just how these projects work. If you are new to this material, start by reading the introduction to the first DOSAT volume. It explains the editorial principles, the abbreviations used throughout the dictionary, and the system of source citations. The abbreviations section alone will save you several hours of confusion. Without it, you will spend a long time wondering what Adv. MSS or Bann. MS. actually refers to. The introduction also contains a list of the major source texts organized by period, which is essential for understanding the weight given to different types of documents in the citations.

The citation search on the website is powerful but finicky. It uses a proprietary database backend that does not support boolean operators in the way you might expect. AND searches are implicit. OR searches require you to enter multiple terms separated by commas, and even then the results are not always reliable. I recommend doing your initial searches with single headwords, then refining by adding source abbreviations or date ranges once you know roughly what you are looking for. Throwing a complex query at the search box and expecting precise results is a reliable way to waste an afternoon. There is no mobile app. There is no API for bulk data extraction. The dictionary is not designed for computational linguistics work, though some researchers have used the publicly available XML files from the OASIS project to do exactly that. If you need to process large volumes of Scots text automatically, you will have to work outside the DOSAT ecosystem and build your own resources from the primary sources the dictionary cites. The dictionary is a reference tool, not a dataset. That distinction matters more than it might seem at first.