Nowt
February 28th 2026
According to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), this Scots term for cattle is a borrowing from early Scandinavian and has been recorded as early as 1398. Though typically used as a collective term, it can also refer to a single ox or cow.
The spelling nolt appears in some early citations, like the Ayr Burgh Court Records (1437): “To keep the toune nolt for the ȝher [year]”. This developed through false analogy with word pairs like colt/cowt and bolt/bowt.
Robert Burns mentioned bullfighting nowt in Twa Dogs (1786): “Or by Madrid he takes the rout, To thrum guittars an fecht wi nowt”.
In the Weir of Hermiston (1896) we find that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “You’re splairging; you’re running at lairge in life like a wild nowt”.
A hundred years later, Sheena Blackwall used the term in Wittgenstein’s Web (1996): “Sandy Milne … brocht up bi a granny fa fyles tuik scunner o the darg an fairmed him oot aroon the Howe like a feedin nowt, tae onybody sikken chaip labour in excheenge fur bed an boord”.
This does seem to link the term to the North East, as we also see in the Press and Journal in February 2019: “At poem tells sae weel the pride an the ambition o a young rural laddie fin eence he left the skweel, wintin tae become a strappin foreman chiel drivin his weel match’t pair – big fite horses wi silken hair. Na, nae for him the dreary darg o lookin efter the nowt”.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
