Haud, from Old English ‘haldan', is one of these common words whose meanings have proliferated. Early senses, including to rule over, keep in charge, guard, keep, extended into to own, grasp, delay, detain in custody, and other meanings have sprung up over the centuries. Among things that can be hauden figuratively are your tongue, your wheesht and your mooth, thereby observing silence. To haud heal is to keep in good health, a state which can be maintained by following the advice of Hew Ainslie in A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns (1822) “Gif ye'd keep dry in back and wame, Hap ye weel, or haud at hame”. To haud the kail het, haud the kettle bilin or haud the pudden reekin' is to keep work or festivities going, used in skipping games when one person must run in as soon as another runs out. You keep a copious supply of something by haudin it on, as Charles Murray suggests in In The Country Places (1920): “Haud on the peats an' fleg the cauld”. Haud can mean to proceed. Best not to enquire what lies behind this quotation from Thomas Henderson's Lockerbie (1937): “Mony a washing o' blankets my mither hung oot ... as a warning tae the lugger tae haud further doon the coast”. To haud awa is to depart. To haud wi something is to be content with it as in this judicial pronouncement from William Alexander in Sketches of Life Among My Ain Folk (1875) “Fining both parties, and advising them to “‘haud wi' less drink neist time'”. To be hauden doun is to be constrained or repressed. Haud forrit is a motto appropriately associated with the Scottish Six Days Trial, an annual test of skill and endurance for motorcyclists, over rocks, through bogs and up burns, reaching its climax today in Fort William.

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