bothy
/ˈbɑθi/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.06 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A small cottage or hut; specifically (Scotland), one often left unlocked for communal use in a remote, often mountainous, area by hikers, labourers, etc.
noun
A building on a farm, sometimes with just one room, for (usually unmarried male) farmworkers or other labourers to live in.
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "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man demanded the means of food and shelter in his retreat nowadays, and a deserted bothy or a cave on the hillside was out of date."
- "Often Neil sat in their bothy on winter nights and told Calum about seas he had never seen."
- "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."
- "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."
- "It was easy then to meet with a man / shifting himself to a safer distance / to bed in the bothies[.]"
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.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈbɑθi/
- British English: /ˈbɒθi/
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
bothyism
bothyman