Scottish

How to spell scottish

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scottish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scottish mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Scotland, its people, its culture, or its language.

Scottish in a sentence

• The museum displayed a collection of traditional scottish tartans.

• Her grandfather spoke with a soft scottish accent.

Where does scottish come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from Scot, the name for a native of Scotland, combined with the common Germanic adjective suffix -ish, which means 'belonging to' or 'characteristic of', as also seen in British, Danish, and Swedish. The word Scot comes from Old English Scottas, a name that originally referred not to the people we now call Scots but to the Gaelic-speaking raiders and settlers who came from Ireland; the Late Latin form was Scotti. Over the early medieval centuries the label shifted northward and eastward as these Gaelic settlers established the kingdom that eventually became Scotland, so the name came to describe the whole country. The adjective form with -ish was well established by the medieval period, alongside the shorter Scots and the now mostly derogatory Scotch. The spelling trap is the doubled t followed by the -ish ending; writers sometimes hesitate over whether the consonant is doubled, but the double t mirrors the spelling in Scot itself.

How the word is built

• Scot (a person from Scotland, from Old English Scottas)
• -ish (adjective suffix meaning 'belonging to' or 'characteristic of')