Tath
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The dung of livestock left on a field to serve as manure or fertiliser. Scotland, UK, archaic, countable, dialectal, historical, uncountable
"after the sheep have trod out a great quantity of stones, in feeding off turnips, to have them raked up clean, which I have known some farmers do, nor can the rake be used without taking some of the tathe, or dung, with them ."
- 2 A piece of ground dunged by livestock. Scotland, UK, archaic, countable, dialectal, historical, uncountable
- 3 Strong grass growing around the dung of kine. Scotland, UK, archaic, countable, dialectal, historical, uncountable
- 1 To manure (land) by pasturing cattle on it, or causing them to lie upon it. Scotland, UK, archaic, dialectal, historical
"I would have no more ploughed than has been tathed the preceding year"
Example
More examples"after the sheep have trod out a great quantity of stones, in feeding off turnips, to have them raked up clean, which I have known some farmers do, nor can the rake be used without taking some of the tathe, or dung, with them ."
Etymology
From Middle English tath, from Old Norse tað (“manure”), from Proto-Germanic *tadą (“manure”), from Proto-Indo-European *dāy- (“to divide, split, part, section”). Cognate with Icelandic tað (“manure, dung”), dialectal Swedish tad (“manure, dung”).
From Middle English tathen, from Old Norse teðja (“to manure”), from Proto-Germanic *tadjaną (“to strew, scatter”), from Proto-Indo-European *dāy- (“to divide, split, part, section”). Cognate with Icelandic teðja (“to dung, manure”), Norwegian tedja (“to dung”), German zetten (“to let fall in small pieces, let crumble”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.