bothy

English

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Etymology

Probably from booth +‎ -y (diminutive suffix). Booth is ultimately derived from Proto-Germanic *bōþō (“building; dwelling; hut”), from *būaną (“to dwell, reside”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰuH- (“to be”). The short vowel /ɒ/, /ɑ/, etc., in the first syllable instead of the long vowel /uː/ in booth may be due to the influence of Irish both and Scottish Gaelic both (“booth, hut”), which have the same etymology as booth.[1]

Pronunciation

Noun

bothy (plural bothies) (chiefly Northern Ireland, Northumberland, Scotland)

  2. A small cottage or hut; specifically (Scotland), one often left unlocked for communal use in a remote, often mountainous, area by hikers, labourers, etc. [from 18th c.]
    Synonym: (Scotland, obsolete) lonquhard
    • 1819, Jedediah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter VIII, in Tales of My Landlord, Third Series. […], volume III (A Legend of Montrose), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; Hurst, Robinson, and Co. […], →OCLC, page 328:
      Angus painted in the most alarming colours the roads, or rather wild tracts, by which it would be necessary for him to travel into Argyleshire, and the wretched huts or bathies where he would be condemned to pass the night, and where no forage could be procured for the horse, unless he could eat the stumps of old heather.
    • 1929, Josephine Tey, The Man in the Queue, The Macmillan Company:
      But civilization had changed that completely. Not one criminal in a thousand now fled to the Highlands or to Wales for refuge. A man demanded the means of food and shelter in his retreat nowadays, and a deserted bothy or a cave on the hillside was out of date.
    • 1955, Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers, Canongate, published 2012, page 106:
      Often Neil sat in their bothy on winter nights and told Calum about seas he had never seen.
    • 1982, Gene Wolfe, chapter XXVII, in The Sword of the Lictor (The Book of the New Sun; 3), New York: Timescape, →ISBN, page 200:
      Then, in the evening of the second day after I had climbed from the pupil of the right eye, I came upon a shepherd's bothy, a sort of beehive of stone, and found in it a cooking pot and a quantity of ground corn.
    • 1995, Alan Warner, Morvern Callar, Vintage, published 2015, page 12:
      The Bog Creeper came out her wee bothy so I stood on the toilet seat and Lanna whipped her skirt down to her boots and sat.
    • 1999, Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page 7:
      It was easy then to meet with a man / shifting himself to a safer distance / to bed in the bothies[.]
  3. A building for workers to rest in.
  4. (agriculture, historical) A building on a farm, sometimes with just one room, for (usually unmarried male) farmworkers or other labourers to live in.

Alternative forms

Derived terms

Translations

References

  1. ^ “bothy, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2025; “bothy, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading

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