Here’s tae us
August 2nd 2025
This popular toast is recorded in full in its DSL entry as Here’s tae us; wha’s like us? Damn few and they’re aw deid. A slightly different version is recorded in The Times in December 1986: “Here’s tae us, Wha’s like us, De’il the wan, an’ they’re a’ deid”. DSL also notes several small variations such as fa’s like us or gey few.
Many of the newspaper examples listed in DSL are critical of the toast. In September 1999, the Mirror noted: “That high opinion of Scottishness, typified by the arrogant saying ‘Wha’s like us? Damn few – and they’re a’ deid,’ is fairly common among us.” Similarly, in February 2004, the Daily Mail said it “represents the Scottish curse of denying or neglecting the great and gifted living among us.”
How far back does the record of the toast go? So far, the earliest example we’ve traced is from the Dundee Evening Telegraph in July 1899, though this alludes to the toast already having been long-established: “The finest toast in the world is the sterling, honest, crusted, old Scotch toast— Here tae us. Wha’s like us?—d—d few!”
This raised another question: how widely known was the toast? Well, one interesting example from October 1943 appeared in the Texas-based Cameron Herald when advertising a local bottling plant: “Toasting a new acquaintance, the friendly Scotsman says, Here’s tae us. The American fighting man responds, Have a ‘Coke’, and a new friendship is sealed … in Dundee as in Dallas.”
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
