Scots Language Centre

BACHELOR n an unmarried man; a third year student, a graduate in the lowest degree at a university

This word’s earliest recorded borrowing from Old French into Scots was in the late fourteenth century. At that stage, it referred to a young knight and we can discover from Gilbert of the Haye’s Buke of Knychthede (1456) “How the bachelere...suld first lere the pointis ... of the ordre”. We find bachelors in the company of other interestingly named young men; “Scutiferis (shieldbearers) and...