{"id":9556,"date":"2014-01-28T10:41:17","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T10:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=9556"},"modified":"2014-01-28T10:41:17","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T10:41:17","slug":"wirlie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=9556","title":{"rendered":"Wirlie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a book I read recently (one of Alexander McCall Smith&#8217;s 44 Scotland Street series) I came across a number of Scots words that were unfamiliar to me. One that I particularly like is <strong>wirlie<\/strong>, which, according the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dsl.ac.uk\/\">Dictionary of the Scots Language<\/a> (DSL), means: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;a place where a field-wall crosses a stream; an opening in a wall to let running water pass through&#8221;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>An interesting meaning that I would never have guessed from the word or the context. It is apparently a Shetland word which comes from the Old Norse <em>\u00e1rhil\u00f0<\/em> (<em>\u00e1<\/em> = river, <em>hli\u00f0<\/em> = an opening or gap in a fence), according to <em>Shetland Words &#8211; A dictionary of the Shetland dialect<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>If you came across this word, without knowing the above, what would you think it meant?<\/p>\n<p>In some contexts it might be a euphemism for being drunk or confused &#8211; he was a bit wirlie.<\/p>\n<p>Are there similar words in any other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a book I read recently (one of Alexander McCall Smith&#8217;s 44 Scotland Street series) I came across a number of Scots words that were unfamiliar to me. One that I particularly like is wirlie, which, according the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL), means: &#8220;a place where a field-wall crosses a stream; an opening [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,10,55,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-language","category-scots","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}