Word of the week

• muckle, mickle adj. large in size, big, great; full-grown; of high rank
• Bummler n. a blundering person, a bungler.

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muckle, mickle adj. large in size, big, great; full-grown; of high rank

“muckle, mickle adj. large in size, big, great; full-grown; of high rank”

20th December 2007

Muckle is known to many in the expression ‘mony a mickle maks a muckle’, but given that mickle and muckle are actually different forms of the same word, there are some problems with this phrase. The current received wisdom is that original phrase was probably ‘mony a pickle (a small amount) maks a muckle’, but somehow mickle was substituted for pickle, as though mickle and muckle were opposites.

Oddly enough, the earliest known evidence for the phrase comes from the writings of US president George Washington. Writing in 1793, he remarked on the ‘Scotch addage, than which nothing in nature is more true "that many mickles make a muckle"’. The comparable phrase ‘many a little makes a mickle’, still known in some regional dialects in England, first appears in print in a list of proverbs ‘of the English nation’ in an early seventeenth-century work by William Camden on Britain and its inhabitants.

Muckle is derived from Old English micel and its Old Norse cousin mikill, and is in current use in various parts of the British Isles. In Scots it appears in all different contexts. Old Scots had the term muckledom, meaning ‘bulk’ or ‘size’. A muckle-boukit person has an imposing frame, a muckle coat will keep you warm in the winter and the fish called the Greater Weever is also known as the Muckle Stanger, because of its poisonous spines. The Muckle Toun is Langholm in Dumfriesshire, and Hugh MacDiarmid frequently referred to it by this name in poems such as The Oon Olympian (1932): ‘And I am richt in ga’en back In like wise to the Muckle Toon’. Whaurever yer gaun ower the festive season, caw canny, an mind that mony a pickle (or puckle) maks a muckle (or mickle). Try sayin that efter a few wee haufs.