haugh

From Northern English dialectal and Scots haugh, from Northern Middle English *halgh, from Old English healh (“corner, nook”), from Proto-West Germanic *halh. Doublet of hale.

• (Scotland, Northern England) IPA^(key): /hɔː/, /hɔːx/
• Rhymes: -ɔː, -ɔːx

haugh (plural haughs)

1. (Scotland, Northern England, Ireland) A low-lying meadow by the side of a river.

   Synonym: inch

   • 1816, Jedadiah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter II, in Tales of My Landlord, […], volume I (The Black Dwarf), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for William Blackwood, […]; London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, pages 35–36:

     The sheriff of the county of Lanark was holding the wappen-schaw of a wild district, called the Upper Ward of Clydesdale, on a haugh, or level plain, near to a royal borough, […]

   • 1884, Alexander Maxwell, The History of Old Dundee:

     The position of the playfield is here identified as lying north of this open space between it and the burn, and occupying the haugh which extended west […]

   • 1932, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song (A Scots Quair), Polygon, published 2006, page 46:

     The cattle had […] loved their life in the haughs of Echt, south there across the uncouthy hills was a world cold and unchancy.

   • 1977, K.M. Elizabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 27:

     It was sung from the top of the oldest house in the burgh every June at the Common riding, which served both for a perambulation of the bounds of the common pastures or Haughs and to commemorate the young men of Harwick[.]

Inherited from Northern Middle English *halgh, from Old English healh, from Proto-West Germanic *halh.

• IPA^(key): /hɒx/
• (Southern Scots) IPA^(key): /haf/

haugh (plural haughs)

1. A low-lying meadow in a river valley.