Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines one usage of stave as: “To sprain, bruise or contuse a joint of the body”. And in his 1825 Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language, Jamieson gave this example: “to staive the thoum”; further defining it as to “fa into staves, to smash, to fall into pieces”.

Later, the Caledonian Medical Journal (1904) reported an accident in Fife featuring: “A collier who had been to a bone-setter with a ‘staved thoom’”. And another painful episode is described by Peter Mason in C’mon Geeze Yer Patter (1987): “Ah staved ma big toe breengin aboot in ma baries [bare feet]”.

The following examples refer to the sense of bashing or breaking something. Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) describes: “… an action at law, laid against a carman for having staved a cask of port, it appeared from the evidence of the cooper, that there were not above five gallons of real wine in the whole pipe, which held above a hundred…”. And Denise Mina’s novel The Dead Hour (2006) has: “After five months on the nightly calls-car shift it was only the second incident Paddy had been called to in the area, the other being when a night bus had staved a roundabout and burst a wheel.”.

Finally, in Thomas Clark’s Scots translation Animal Fairm (2023) we find: “A wheen hams hingin ben the kitchen wis taen oot and yirdit, and the beer bowie in the scullery wis staved in wi a blooter frae Boxer’s huif, but ithergates nocht in the hoose wis titched.”

Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.