Ulster Scots: a linen-weaving dictionary

As Scottish immigrants moved into Ulster throughout the seventeenth century, they brought distinctive Scots speech, spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. Over 400 years later, the rich heritage of this ‘marriage’ is known as Ulster Scots. The language has gone through a series of revivals, notably in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Poetry and literature are perhaps the most significant legacies of Ulster Scots. For example, John Hewitt’s Rhyming Weavers and other country poets of Antrim and Down (1974), identified a body of unique, vernacular style of poetry native to Ulster, and in particular the east of the province. As Hewitt notes, from their poems ‘we may learn a great deal about rural society and its structure’.  These poets are the Rhyming Weavers, even if weaving was only a sideline, and the name they adopted reflects the fact that the linen industry was a staple of economic life in Ulster.

To reflect the close relationship between the linen industry, life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ulster, and the Ulster Scots tradition, the Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum has drawn together a dictionary of Ulster Scots linen terms. This list is not exhaustive, and if you would like to contribute please email ilc.reception@lisburncastlereagh.gov.uk

In column one we have the Ulster Scots term, its meaning in column two, and the source in column three.  A full bibliography can be found below.