Aumous
Alms. A charitable gift. A good deed.
Explore a word that links language with food, hospitality, poverty relief, literature, and the moral life of Scottish communities.
Alms and Charity
The central idea of material help freely given to someone in need.
Explore →The Aumous Dish
The small dish traditionally associated with receiving or measuring food given as alms.
Explore →Poor Relief in Scotland
How informal charity, kirk support, parish systems, and statutory relief overlapped.
Explore →Aumous in Literature
How poets, novelists, memoirists, and dialect writers preserved the word.
Explore →Etymology
The path from Greek and Latin charity vocabulary through Old and Middle English into Scots.
Explore →Research Guide
Methods for finding aumous in dictionaries, digitized books, newspapers, archives, and historical corpora.
Explore →A word with a social world around it
Aumous appears beside meal, bannocks, bowls, begging customs, hospitality, kirk relief, and literary humor. This archive places those fragments back into context.
Language preserves not only what people called things, but how they understood duty, need, and generosity.