This seems like an innocent wee word but it has very long entries in the dictionaries. Many early examples refer to cleaving of heids, decapitation and so on. Kelly’s collection of Proverbs (1721) puts a Scots slant on the warning not to shoot the messenger: “ Messengers should neither be headed nor hang’d”. In modern parlance, to lose the heid means to suffer a temporary fit of uncontrolled temper, but the threat of capital punishment still remains in this dire warning given by an Aberdeenshire speaker in 1952: “Gin I see ye tormentin’ that peer beastie again, I’ll gie ye yer heid in yer han’s an’ yer lugs tae play wi’!” Pittin (or stickin) the heid on someone is not an antidote to the aforesaid, but a further form of violence. Yer heid can be full of mince, in which case you are probably a bit of a heid-banger or heid-the-baw. Heiders, though, might be our ticket to the next world cup. From John and Willy Maley’s From the Calton to Catalonia (1990) we have: “Mammy, ah scored a hat trick! Wan a flyin heider! Wan wae ma left fit!” and an Edinburgh woman in 2000 complained of youngsters “Playin heiders against a clean close wa”. The heid is the top part of something or the top person. So we read in W. D. Latto’s Tammas Bodkin, Swatches o’ Hodden-Grey (1894) of “The aunchent an’ honourable family o’ the Bodkins, whaurof I ...am at the present day head-bummer!” From this we may deduce that he was the high-heid-yin, a phrase illustrated in the Scots Magazine (May 1928) “He wis administratin’ somewheers in India, a rale high heid yin, mind ye”. Heidroom in Scots can mean a grave and you are much more likely to get a headstone in Scotland than in England where they prefer gravestones.


Scots Word of the Week is written by Chris Robinson of Scottish Language Dictionaries.

This week's Word is spoken by Dr Dauvit Horsbroch.