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.
Video: The rhythm of the loom – our master weavers at work in the Museum’s Weaving Workshop
| Ulsters-Scots | Definition | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Breakin’ | Scutching | Hewitt |
| Claith | Cloth | Fenton |
| Clovin’ | Breaking of flax straw pror to scuthcing. | Hewitt; DSL |
| Crabbit | Difficult to handle threads, not smooth | Hewitt |
| Croppins | Wasted weft | Hewitt |
| Doffer | Doffer, sb. a girl who doffs, i.e. takes off the full bobbins from the spinning frames. The doffers are the youngest girls employed in flax spinning-mills. | Patterson |
| Dreeper | Draper | |
| Flowans, Flouans | the light clinging dust in a flax-scutching mill; small fragments of the flax stem. | Patterson |
| Hanks | Measure of spun yarn | Hewitt |
| Heckle | Hackle, combs for dressing flax | Hewitt |
| Keel man | The term for a class of illiterate buyers, who used to attend the country linen markets. When one of them purchased a web of brown hand-loom linen, he marked with a piece of ‘keel,’ on the outside lap, some obscure characters, which were to the keel man a record of the cost price, &c. | Patterson |
| Kieve | Tub or vat for holding bleach | |
| Lea | Lea, sb. a measure of linen yarn | Patterson |
| Line | Dressed flax | Patterson |
| Lint | Flax | Hewitt; DSL |
| Pirns | Bobbins or spools for the shuttle | Hewitt |
| Queel | Quill | Hewitt |
| Reel | Newly spun yarn on a wheel | Hewitt |
| Ret | Steep flax | Patterson |
| Ripple | Take the seed off flax | Patterson |
| Rock | Distaff | Hewitt |
| Sarking | a coarse kind of linen; | Patterson |
| Shows, Shoughs, Shives, | flax refuse | Patterson |
| Slays | Part of a loom | Hewitt |
| Sliver | Flax in process of being spun by machinery is drawn out into a ribbon or long lock before it is twisted: this lock is called sliver. | Patterson |
| Spangle | Four hanks | Hewitt |
| Spirit | a mildew or disease to which growing flax is subject. | Patterson |
| Spit | Axis of a spinning wheel | Hewitt |
| Sprig | Sprig, v. to embroider muslin or linen. | Patterson |
| Strick | a small handful of flax fibre. (2) v. to arrange flax which has passed through the rollers, for the scutchers, so as to make it as even as possible. | Patterson |
| Tap o’ tow | Tap o’ tow. Flax or tow placed on the ‘rock’ of a spinning-wheel, which if set on fire, would be all ablaze in an instant. Hence the saying — ‘He went aff like a tap o’ tow,’ meaning he got into a flaming passion in an instant. | Patterson |
| Tendered | made tender, as linen sometimes is in ‘the bleach.’ ‘The fibre (of flax) tendered by excess of moisture.’ | Patterson |
| Thrum | a threepence. A commission of three pence per stone on flax, paid by a flax buyer to a person who brings the buyer and seller together in open market. | Patterson |
| Twitty | Clumsily-spun threads | Hewitt |
| Wab | Web | Hewitt |
| Wabster | Weaver | Hewitt |
| Waling Glass | Counting glass | Patterson |
| Warp | Yarn attached to the beam of a loom; interlaced with the weft. | Hewitt |
| Webber | Linen buyer | Patterson |
Sources
John Hewitt, Rhyming Weavers and other country poets of Antrim and Down (1974)
James Fenton, The Hamely Tongue, a personal record of Ulster-Scots in County Antrim, Fourth Edition
Dictionary of Scot Language (DSL)
William Patterson, A Glossary of Words and Phrases used in Antrim and Down, (1880)