Hampden roar
August 15th 2026
What’s the Hampden roar? This term is first recorded in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) as, “the cheer of the crowd at Hampden Park football stadium in Glasgow”.
The current earliest example in DSL comes from the Independent in March 1994: “Before the war, when such niceties concerned only the well-to-do few, those who created the Hampden Roar needed no cover in order to raise the roof”. However, research has unearthed much earlier instances, one being from the Sunday Post in March 1935: “The famous Hampden Roar will have a new note on April 6—International day. It will be supplied by the treble voices of 1600 schoolboys in the east enclosure”.
A memorable recent example comes from STV News, who reported in November 2025 that, “the Hampden Roar was so powerful it literally shook the earth and triggered earthquake monitors” when Scotland beat Denmark to qualify for the 2026 World Cup.
The term is also used as, “rhyming slang for score”, as in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993): “It’s aw oor poppy [money]! Lenny snapped.—Granty kens the … Hampden roar”.
This use often still relates to football, as we see in the Evening Times (May 2020): “What did Kenny Dalglish then dae? Well, Kenny Dalglish looked the owners in the eye and asked them straight, ‘Am a keeping the job, give me an aye or a naw, no a ‘maybes aye’ or a ‘maybes naw’ … just gie us it wan way or another, what’s the Hampden roar here’”.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
