Kailyard

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A kitchen garden. Scotland

    "There was formerly a poor widow, and she had three daughters, and all she had to feed them was a kailyard. There was a great gray horse who was coming every day to the yard to eat the kail."

  2. 2
    A late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century school of writing, set in small Scottish towns, a notable example being J. M Barrie's A Small Minister

Example

More examples

"There was formerly a poor widow, and she had three daughters, and all she had to feed them was a kailyard. There was a great gray horse who was coming every day to the yard to eat the kail."

Etymology

From kail + yard.

Related phrases

Kailyard schoolkitchen garden

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.