Completing the Record of Scots

THE two large dictionaries of Scots which are now being produced in Edinburgh owe their existence to the late Sir William Craigie, co-editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 19go0. A suggestion of Craigie's in a lecture given in Dundee in 1907 led to the formation of the Scottish Dialects Committee, out of which there was to come some twenty years later the Scottish National Dictionary. Then in I9I9 Craigie propounded his historic plan for following the Oxford English Dictionary with a series of large and detailed 'period dictionaries', one for each of the main stages or periods in the history of English and Scots. This plan has been so far fulfilled in the Dictionary of American English (edited by Craigie himself and J. R. Hulbert), the University of Michigan's Middle English Dictionary, now published to F, and the two Scottish dictionaries. The latter are the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (D.O.S. T.), a record of the old national literary and official language of Scotland down to the Union of the Parliaments, and the Scottish National Dictionary (S.N.D.), of the Scottish regional dialects of the last two and a half centuries and of modern Scots vernacular literature since Allan Ramsay. D.O.S.T., which was edited from i919, when he began collecting the material, until 1955 by Craigie himself, had its first Part published by the University of Chicago Press in I931. Meantime, in 1928 William Grant, who had been Convener of the Scottish Dialects Committee since its inception, retired from his post as Phonetics Lecturer in Aberdeen Training Centre and began assembling the material for S.N.D. round the Committee's collections as its nucleus. The first Part of S.N.D. also appeared in 1931, published by a non-profit-making limited company formed for the purpose. Both dictionaries are now published as far as M. The principal predecessors of the new Scottish dictionaries are respectively the Oxford English Dictionary completed in 1928, and

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