Scot

How to spell scot

4 letters · 1 syllable

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