11/10/2025
PLENISH: ‘To furnish, supply, or stock (with)’ (https://dsl.ac.uk/our-publications/scots-word-of-the-week/plenish/).
The long history of this term, meaning “to furnish, supply, or stock (with)” is well documented in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL).
One of DSL’s earliest examples comes from Blind Harry’s Wallace (c1475): “Thai … Plenyst that place with gud wittail [food] and wyne”.
The term was frequently used to refer to stocking a place with provisions, crops, or animals, as in the following from The Register of the Privy Seal of Scotland in 1568: “And to plenneis the samin [forest] with deir, ra, meiris and stallownis”. That is: to populate the same [forest] with deer, roe, mares and stallions.
It was also used to refer to furnishing a property, giving rise to plenishing, a term for furniture or household equipment. Sir Walter Scott used this term in Heart of Midlothian (1818): “Duncan Knock’s father had been at that onslaught, and brought back muckle gude plenishing”.
The Lanark and Carluke Advertiser provided a more recent example in October 1989: “Weekly sale of household Furniture including Modern Bedroom unit, … D.R Suite, also the residue plenishing from a Hamilton Estate.”
In May 2017, The Herald printed a reader’s complaint about progressive taxation, showing that, after more than 500 years of use, the term is still holding on: “It is patently unfair that those whose honestly earned income exceeds a figure arbitrarily plucked out of the air by politicians keen to curry favour with the rest of the electorate should be obliged to plenish the public purse at higher rate than the rest of us”.
Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/plenish
