Pirlie
July 5th 2025
Pirlie has a couple of interesting meanings, each independently derived from the verb pirl, which means to twist, curl, or roll.
The first of these, “a small curled thing” or “anything very small” is applied to the pinkie finger in the words pirlie, pirlie-winkie, or pirlie-winkle. An early example comes from C. I. Johnstone’s Elizabeth de Bruce (1827): “Ye ken Tam could thrash you wi’ his little pirlie”.
The second is found in pirlie-pig, “a money-box, generally circular in shape and made of earthenware, with a slot for inserting coins”. This comes from a specific sense of the verb – to manoeuvre a “small object by a series of pokes and prods”.
The term has a long pedigree, with DSL’s earliest example coming from James Thomson’s History of Dundee (1799): “Old women and children kept their pozes [savings] in their kist neuks and pirly pigs”.
William Allan uses the form pirlie in Rose and Thistle: Poems and Songs (1878): “Put your penny in the pirlie, Dinna spen’ it noo; See! It’s just a haudin’ ferlie, Haudin’ till it’s fu’.”
In February 2025, the Border Telegraph reported on a new platform from Historic Environment Scotland (HES) which allows users to explore heritage objects online: “Some of the gems from the Borders available to explore on trove.scot include the pirlie pig, a medieval piggy bank on show at Melrose Abbey.” You can find several surviving examples of pirlie pigs on the website (in various states of repair).
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
