Dictionaries of the Scots Language

The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) (Scots: Dictionars o the Scots Leid, Scottish Gaelic: Faclairean na h-Albais) is an online Scots–English dictionary platform managed by the Scottish lexicographic body now called Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO. Freely available via the Internet, the DSL resource makes available the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language:

DOST contains information about Older Scots words in use from the 12th century to 1700 (Early and Middle Scots). The SND contains information about Scots words in use from 1700 to the 1970s (Modern Scots). DSL brings together the contents of these 22 volumes to provide comprehensive coverage of vocabulary throughout the history of Scots. The DSL website can be used to access both dictionaries, which together contain more than 78,500 entries and 750,000 illustrative citations.[1]

SND's Bibliography and DOST's Register of Titles have also been digitised and can be searched in the same way as the dictionaries' A-Z content. A new SND supplement was added to DSL in 2005, covering material up to that date.

History

The original project to digitise all 22 volumes of the SND and DOST to create the first online Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL1) ran from February 2001 to January 2004. It was based at the University of Dundee and was primarily funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board,[2] with additional support provided by the Scottish National Dictionary Association and the Russell Trust.[3] The DSL1 team was led by academic, Dr Victor Skretkowicz and lexicographer, Susan Rennie, a former Senior Editor with the Scottish National Dictionary Association.[4][5][6][7] The methodology of DSL1 was based on a previous, pilot project by Rennie to digitise the Scottish National Dictionary, in which page scans of the print SND were converted to machine-readable text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Mark-up was then added using a customised XML format based on Text Encoding Initiative guidelines.[8][9][10] As well as the editorial team in Dundee, the project was assisted by the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queen’s University, Belfast, and the Language Technology Group at the University of Edinburgh. The Dundee-born poet, Jim Stewart, also worked for a time as a proofreader on the DSL1 project.[11][12]

After the launch of DSL1 in 2004, the original editorial team in Dundee was disbanded, although work continued separately to update the content of the source dictionaries by Scottish Language Dictionaries (SLD). SLD later partnered with the University of Glasgow, who currently host the DSL, and a number of subsequent versions of DSL have been published, providing additional search facilities and updates to the user interface.[13] The Dictionary of the Scots Language data was also used to create sample categories for a new Historical Thesaurus of Scots (HTS) project, led by Rennie at the University of Glasgow, which was launched in 2015.[14][15]

Dr Victor Skretkowicz was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1942 and in 1978 he joined the English Department in the University of Dundee. In 1989, he became the University's representative on the Joint Council for the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, being elected as its convenor three years later. Under his direction it was responsible for volumes 9–12 of that dictionary. In 2001, he was appointed Research Director of the project to create the Dictionary of the Scots Language. Skretkowicz retired from Dundee in 2007 and died in 2009. Archives relating to his work are held by the University of Dundee's Archive Services.[16][17]

Nomenclature

The first online version of the DSL, launched in 2004, was called the Dictionary of the Scots Language / Dictionar o the Scots Leid. It is now referred to as DSL1 to distinguish it from later versions, which use the plural Dictionaries of the Scots Language, to match the current name of the organisation which manages the lexicographic resources on the DSL website.[18]

Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO

Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO is the body currently responsible for A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), the Scottish National Dictionary (SND), and the online Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL). The organisation has a long history under a number of guises. It began as two separate bodies: the Scottish Dictionaries Joint Council (founded in 1953 out of the original DOST project team, which itself had been founded in the early 1920s) and the Scottish National Dictionary Association (founded in 1929 and responsible for the compilation of the Scottish National Dictionary, under the original editorship of William Grant). These joined forces in 2002 to become Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd, which in turn became Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO in January 2021[19].

References

  1. ^ "Dictionaries of the Scots Language :: DSL Online". Retrieved 2 March 2026.
  2. ^ "Online plan for Scots dictionary". BBC News. 3 June 2002. Retrieved 29 June 2025.
  3. ^ About the DSL (first edition) at the Wayback Machine (archived 4 February 2005)
  4. ^ "Researchers Put the Scots Language Online". Times Higher Education Supplement. April 2002. Retrieved 16 April 2022.
  5. ^ "Scots wha hae web access". Contact. May 2002. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
  6. ^ "MSP supports Scots language project". June 2002. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  7. ^ "Online move for Scots language". BBC News. 25 March 2004. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  8. ^ Susan Rennie (June 2001). "The Electronic Scottish National Dictionary (eSND): Work in Progress". Literary and Linguistic Computing. 16 (2): 153–160.
  9. ^ Rennie, Susan (August 2000). "Encoding a Historical Dictionary with the TEI (With reference to the Electronic Scottish National Dictionary Project)". In Ulrich Heid; Stefan Evert; Egbert Lehmann; Christian Rohrer (eds.). Proceedings of the 9th EURALEX International Congress. Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung. pp. 261–271.
  10. ^ Rennie, Susan (2016). "The Lexicography of Scots". In Hanks, Patrick & G.-M. de Schryver (ed.). International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography. Berlin: Springer.
  11. ^ About the DSL (first edition) at the Wayback Machine (archived 4 February 2005)
  12. ^ "Celebrating Jim Stewart: the Dundee poet who paid attention". Retrieved 14 March 2026.
  13. ^ "Dictionaries of the Scots Language :: Versions and Changes". Retrieved 2 March 2026.
  14. ^ "Historical Thesaurus of Scots". Scotlex. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
  15. ^ Rennie, Susan (2016). "Creating a Historical Thesaurus of Scots". In Rodríguez Álvarez, A. (ed.). Words across History: Advances in Historical Lexicography and Lexicology. Las Palmas: Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University Press.
  16. ^ "UR-SF 62 Papers of Dr Victor Skretkowicz". Archive Services Online Catalogue. University of Dundee. Retrieved 12 December 2016.
  17. ^ "Blog entry: The papers of the late Dr Victor Skretkowicz..." Archives, Records and Artefacts – Blog. University of Dundee. 24 November 2010. Retrieved 28 April 2017.
  18. ^ "Dictionaries of the Scots Language :: Versions and Changes". Retrieved 2 March 2026.
  19. ^ "Dictionaries of the Scots Language :: About us". Retrieved 2 March 2026.
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