Dictionary of the Scots Language

The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) (Scots: Dictionars o the Scots Leid, Scottish Gaelic: Faclairean na h-Albais) is an online Scots–English dictionary platform managed by Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO. Freely available via the Internet, this resource makes available the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language:

• Scottish National Dictionary (SND), originally published in 10 volumes between 1931 and 1976.
• Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), originally published in 12 volumes between 1931 and 2002.

DOST contains information about Older Scots words in use from the 12th century to 1700 (Early and Middle Scots); SND contains information about Scots words in use from 1700 to the 1970s (Modern Scots).

DSL brings the contents of these 22 volumes together for the first time, providing comprehensive coverage of vocabulary throughout the history of Scots. Users can use the platform to access both dictionaries, which together contain more than 78,500 entries and 750,000 illustrative citations.

SND's Bibliography and DOST's Register of Titles have also been digitised and can be searched in the same way as the dictionaries' A-Z content. A new SND supplement was added to DSL in 2005, covering material up to that date.

History

The digitisation of SND and DOST ran from February 2001 to January 2004. The project, which was based at the University of Dundee, was primarily funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, with additional support provided by the Scottish National Dictionary Association and the Russell Trust.

The project began by scanning SND's content and converting these scans to machine-readable text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. The same methodology was used for the early volumes of DOST; the later volumes already existed in electronic form. Typographic information such as typefaces, sizes, and spacing was also codified so that the online versions of the texts could replicate the print originals.

Current work on DSL is guided by the strategic priorities determined by its Board of Governors in 2023, namely:

• Curation of DSL Online as the organisation's primary purpose, with smaller derivative publications and collaborations on publicly-funded projects as minor, secondary objectives;
• Modernisation of the online platform;
• Prioritisation of SND over DOST where resources are limited.

Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO

Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO is the body responsible for A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), the Scottish National Dictionary (SND), and the online Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL). The organisation has a long and distinguished history under a number of guises. It began as two separate bodies: the Scottish Dictionaries Joint Council (founded in 1953 out of the original DOST project team, which itself had been founded in the early 1920s) and the Scottish National Dictionary Association (founded in 1929 and responsible for the compilation of SND). These joined forces in 2002 to become Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd, which in turn became Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO in January 2021.

External links

• Official website
• ScotLex page on the Dictionary of the Scots Language