Gallus
March 7th 2026
There are many nuances to this wee word which has developed out of the term gallows. In the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) it is first defined as “villainous, rascally” with a quotation from Robert Burns’s Earnest Cry (1786): “An’ plunder’d o’ her hindmost groat, By gallows knaves”.
We then have the broader, more familiar definition: “wild, unmanageable, ‘tough’, bold, daring, high-spirited; perky, impish, mischievous, impudent”.
An early illustration of this weaker meaning can be found in the Inverness Courier in August 1843: “here’s a gallus button off, I’ll jist fix that”.
The shift from gallows to gallus is hard to pin down, and the spelling was even discussed in the Sunday Post in October 1928: “There is a word that I can’t spell, but which every Glasgow man will recognise. The word is ‘Gallus’. ‘Gallus’ indicates swank, but swank with a saving sense of humour. The Glasgow man is ‘gallus’. He swanks, but all the time you suspect that he is laughing at himself”.
Gallus remains popular. In March 2020, the Ayr Advertiser reported on ‘Tae A Virus’, a viral poem about COVID-19 which contains the following lines: “Ye might be gallus noo ma freen, As ye jump fae cup tae cup, But when we get oor vaccine made, Yer number will be up”.
The term received plenty of attention in 2025; Connor Burns used it as the title of his stand-up comedy show, and the pantomime Gallus in Weegieland was performed at the Tron Theatre during the festive season.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
