This word is defined in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language as: “Thin, emaciated, puny …” and “Spiritless, craven, timid”.

An early example comes from Sir Robert Moray in a letter to Alexander Bruce (1658) offering no compliments on the quality of Bruce’s wine: “I think not you did amisse to abstain from wine a while … seing [sic] … the best you have is but shilpit stuff”.

Stuart A Paterson uses the word to mean timid in his poem Here’s the Weather (2017): “… it’s a gey sair fecht/ against pavements like ice rinks & wrasslin wi wind…/shilpit & footerin & plooterin awa/ through the dubs & the glaur & the clart & the snaw…”

The word is now generally used to mean feeble, as here in George MacDonald Fraser’s The General Danced at Dawn (1970): “Baxter hesitated. ‘He called me a shilpit wee nyaff, sir.’ The president stirred. ‘He called you what?’ Baxter coloured slightly. ‘A shilpit wee nyaff.’” Nyaff and shilpit seem to go together… “He stood up, and Carlin saw for the first time what a puny, insignificant, shilpit wee nyaff he really was”. (The Fanatic, 2000, James Robertson.)

Lastly, it is used in a comment on the Olympic Games from The National (August 2021): “Imagine poor wee shilpit Scotland trying to garner its own medals rather than being a part of something bigger and better ­funded. Actually, I don’t have to, having watched two Commonwealth Games in Scotland and seen the real euphoria which greeted those winning in a Saltire vest”.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel, Dictionaries of the Scots Language https://dsl.ac.uk.