Scot

How to spell scot

4 letters · 1 syllable

23 of the 37 people asked to spell scot in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is scott. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

scott scot

What people typed instead

• scott18 people

How to pronounce scot

What does scot mean?

1. nounA native or inhabitant of Scotland.

Scot in a sentence

• As a proud scot, she celebrated Burns Night with haggis and poetry.

• The team captain was a scot who had grown up near Glasgow.

Where does scot come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This little word comes from the Old Norse skot, meaning a contribution, share, or payment, and it is closely related to the native English word 'shot' in the old sense of a tavern reckoning or bill that the drinkers had to settle. Norse-speaking settlers brought the term to England, and it was reinforced by the Old French escot, which carried the same idea of a tax or assessment. In medieval towns 'scot' was a local tax levied according to a person's means, often paired in the phrase 'scot and lot' for the obligations of full citizenship. The root literally pointed to something thrown in or shot down as a payment, the way money is put into a common pot. The word almost vanished from everyday use, but it lives on in 'scot-free', which originally meant free from having to pay the scot and only later came to mean escaping punishment of any kind.

How the word is built

• scot (a payment or contribution), from Old Norse skot 'a tax or share'; survives chiefly in the compound scot-free

People who misspell scot also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got scot wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• deemed 100% of them got it wrong
• mogul 50% of them got it wrong