Nacket
July 25th 2026
The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) outline several meanings for nacket, including: “a small, neat person; a pert, tricky or precocious child”. The diminutive form, nackaty or nackatie, can also be used for extra emphasis.
The term is recorded in DSL from the sixteenth century onwards, having been borrowed into Older Scots from French with the original meaning “a boy who serves or stops the ball at tennis”.
Two centuries later, Lord Hailes noted in Ancient Scottish Poems (1770) that nacket was used for “an insignificant person”. This idea of smallness has been crucial to the meaning ever since, as the following example from Marshall Bell’s Pickles and Ploys (1932) really stresses: “Fancy a wee bit knackit like yon belittlin’ honest, hard-workin’ smiths!”.
A helpful account of how the term seems to have developed appeared in the Forfar Dispatch in June 1937: “A nacquet in French was a lad who marked at tennis, and hence a nacket denoted someone of small size and came to be used for a diminutive or insignificant person, as indeed it is still used locally in the familiar ‘little nacket’”.
The term is still used. In February 2018, a piece in the Dundee Courier demonstrated there are still creative ways to introduce someone’s small stature: “‘There’s a wee shilpit nacket at the back door’, the housekeeper, Mrs Goudie, said from behind Bunty, making her jump. ‘A what, Mrs Goudie? Translate, please,’ she requested. ‘A wee fella, astray in his claes. Wearin’ a bunnet like a little parasol’”.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
