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Learning in Literature

dominie n. a schoolmaster, teacher

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“dominie n. a schoolmaster, teacher”

29th October 2007

Dominie is a word that can still be found in modern Scots, though at the present time it is often used in reference to educators from a bygone era. In Kate Atkinson's novel, Emotionally Weird (2000), for example: "Watson Grant's door ... was open to reveal a group of bored students to whom he was dictating like an old-fashioned dominie". Also in 2000, an article in the Sunday Herald described Tam Dalyell's powerful voice as "a sound reaching back ... to an Etonian schooling in the late 1940s, and to classroom discipline as a Bo'ness Academy dominie in the late 1950s".
The word dominie is also found in texts from England dating back to the seventeenth century, though it is now largely restricted to Scotland. The earliest Scottish evidence for the word dates back to the eighteenth century. One of Robert Smith's Poems of Controversy (1714), for instance, makes reference to an amount of money, "the hunder Merk, Which the Queen granted to Glenshee, For to maintain a Dominie". In an early quotation in James Kelly's Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs (1721), dominie is used to mean a university student. Proverbs should stand the test of time, so judge for yourself whether this three hundred year old expression may still hold true: "Doves and Domines leave ay a foul House".
Dominie is derived from Latin domine, the form of the word dominus "lord" or "master" used in direct speech. Both in Scotland and England, dominie was formerly used as a term for a clergyman. This sense can still be found in American English, as in the following quotation from the New York Review of Books (2004): "William Elliott Griffis ... was one of the giddiest revisionist historians, so much a victim of Holland fever that he even served for many years as the dominie of a Dutch Reformed Church in Schenectady".