One area of language that is very scantily covered in the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) is the language of Scottish Gypsies and Travellers which has passed into mainstream Scots usage. This was largely due to the paucity of information from these groups during the compilation of SND. With the revision of the Concise Scots Dictionary, due for publication in 2016, the editors are trying to address at least some of these omissions. 

The precise date when ‘pagger' meaning ‘a fight' or ‘to fight' passed into general usage is unclear but it seems to be strongly connected to the Edinburgh area. It is possibly derived from Romany ‘poggra' ‘to break' or ‘pagard' meaning ‘breathless'. Heirich Gottlieb Grellman in his 1787 ‘Dissertation on the Gipsies  collected the form ‘Pàkjum' ‘to break' from continental gipsies which is possibly the same word.

It is still very much in current usage as illustrated by the following example from the Daily Record of 2^nd March 2015 which is discussing the drinking habits of a minority of Hibernian football fans: “The reality is that the drink has nothing to do with whether people want a pagger, it's the mentality of a small number of fans before they even have a tipple in the first place.” The verb is neatly illustrated by Robert McNeil when he writes about the ten plagues of Egypt and the flight of the Israelites in the Scotsman of 2^nd February 2006: “The Israelites had actually been armed, and it's possible they turned round to pagger the charioteers, though you'd have thought Exodus would have made the most of this, instead of depicting Moses's mob as a bunch of saps saved by a dividing sea.”

In the Word Collection of Scottish Language Dictionaries the earliest example comes from Traveller author Betsy Whyte in her autobiographical The Yellow on the Broom first published in 1979: “She had been told that he was being held on suspicion of having given Johnnie Whyte a paggering. Johnnie was lying in Perth Infirmary unconscious, not expected to live.”

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language