Sc. Also 8 bothay. [Of uncertain history: Irish and Gaelic have both ‘hut’ (dim. bothan), and Gael. has dim. bothag; but as the th in Gael. has been mute for many centuries, it is not easy to see how these could have given bothy. Cf. BOOTH.]
1. A hut or cottage; spec. a building consisting of one room in which the unmarried men servants on a farm are lodged together, or in which masons, quarrymen, etc., lodge together. (Bothies of women have also been recently tried, as a substitute for the ‘Bondage’ system.)
[1570–87. Holinshed, Scot. Chron. (1806), I. 19. Arran otherwise called Botha after St. Brandons time who dwelled there in a little cottage which (as all other the like were in those daies) was called Botha.]
1771. Pennant, Tours Scotl. (1790), 124. A Sheelin or Bothay, a cottage made of turf.
1854. H. Miller, Sch. & Schm., ix. (1857), 174. The sort of life that is spent in bothies and barracks.
1876. Grant, Burgh Sch. Scot., II. xv. 511, note. The children came … to attend school in a small bothy.
2. attrib., as in bothy-life, -man, -system (in reference to farm bothies).
1854. H. Miller, Sch. & Schm., ix. 192. The influences of … the barrack, or rather bothy life. Ibid. (1858), 239. Ninety-nine out of every hundred of our bothy-men. Ibid., xi. What has since been extensively known as the bothy system.
Hence Bothyism, the farm-bothy system.
1864. Cornh. Mag., Nov., 618. Looking only at what may be called well-regulated bothyism, it is difficult to conceive how such a system can be defended.
