Gauger
June 14th 2025
This term for an exciseman comes from the verb gauge, defined in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) as: “To ascertain the content of a cask, generally of liquor; to perform the duties of an exciseman”.
As many of you will know, Robert Burns was an exciseman in his later career and riding out to collect taxes in all weathers may have hastened his early death – to say nothing of the medical treatments of the day.
An early mention in the DSL comes from 1721 in The Minutes of the Justices of the Peace for Lanarkshire: “Greivances of the brewers . . . in relation to their paying in of money to the gadgers . . . for payment of their excise to the collector thereof.”
Moving on to poetry, Allan Ramsay in his Tea-Table Miscellany (1726) wrote: “When malt-men come for siller, And gaugers with wands o’er soon”. Burns also records the term in his Epistle to Dr Blacklock (1789): “But what d’ye think my trusty fier? I am turned a gauger – Peace be here!”.
Leaving the eighteenth century behind, we find the following in George Abel’s Wylins fae my Wallet (1916): “The maister scauls [scolds], exceptin fin the gauger looks in-by”. Yes, always be polite to the taxman.
Is there any recent use of the term? Sort of. It survives in the name of a mountain-bike trail near Tomintoul called Gauger’s lookout. There was also a Gauger Bar in Seagate, Dundee.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
