Word.ws English Dictionary

tath

tath noun: the dung of livestock left on a field to serve as manure or fertiliser.

Noun

tath (countable and uncountable, plural taths)

  1. (Scotland, UK, archaic, dialectal, historical) The dung of livestock left on a field to serve as manure or fertiliser.
    • 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 .1804, Arthur Young, The Farmer's Calendar
  2. (Scotland, UK, archaic, dialectal, historical) A piece of ground dunged by livestock.
  3. (Scotland, UK, archaic, dialectal, historical) Strong grass growing around the dung of kine.

Verb

tath (third-person singular simple present taths, present participle tathing, simple past and past participle tathed)

  1. (Scotland, UK, archaic, dialectal, historical) To manure (land) by pasturing cattle on it.
    • I would have no more ploughed than has been tathed the preceding year1808, Agricultural Surveys: Inverness

Forms of tath

Noun
pluraltaths
alternative formteathe
alternative formtathe
Verb
third-person singular presenttaths
present participletathing
past participletathed
pasttathed

Origin of tath

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”).

Questions about tath

What does tath mean?
Tath means the dung of livestock left on a field to serve as manure or fertiliser.
What part of speech is tath?
Tath can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of tath?
The plural of tath is taths.

Words near tath in the dictionary

  1. Tatevosyans
  2. Tatewosian
  3. Tateyama
  4. Tatge
  5. Tatges
  6. tath
  7. tathagata
  8. tathagatas
  9. Tatham
  10. Tathams
  11. tathata

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tath (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “tath.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tath. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.