Hottle
March 15th 2025
This Scots counterpart to the English word hotel is recorded in DSL through a number of nineteenth-century examples. Sir Walter Scott wrote in St Ronan’s Well (1824): “They maun hae a hottle, maun they? — and an honest public canna serve them”.
In 1887, John Service seemed to draw a distinction between hotels and inns in his Dr Duguid: “Then came the paraud through the toon, and the halt at the various hottles and inns”.
A later example from April 1910, uncovered through additional research, appeared in the Montrose Standard: “There’s the High Street hottles for the visitors with money to spend from London”.
In the twenty-first century the term still remains in people’s collective memory. The Glasgow Times recalled in June 2020 that: “In Trongate once stood the grand Tontine Hotel. Reputedly, it was the first in the city and was named ‘The Hottle’ by Glaswegians at the time”.
Interestingly, the term may have seen some use overseas. The following quotation appears in Richard Walsar’s Tar Heel, a book about the humour of North Carolina from 1709 until the early 1970s: “After refreshment at the Bar’s Den, as Johnson ever afterwards called it, they went into the Hottle, took their seats with the crowd and awaited dinner”. Many Scottish and Irish migrants settled in the Carolinas and, naturally, took their language with them. It’s certainly possible then that, at least for a time, the term gained a foothold across the Atlantic.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
