Loanin
A narrow lane or unpaved track, typically running between fields or from a farm out to the road. The Ulster Scots word for a country path that doesn't quite warrant the name of road. Heard particularly in rural Antrim, Down, and Tyrone.
Etymology
From Older Scots 'loaning', a milking-place or track between pastures, attested from the fifteenth century. The word travelled to Ulster with Scots settlement in the seventeenth century. The dialect form 'loanin' (the final -g dropped, which is characteristic of Ulster Scots speech) is the surviving form in everyday use. The English standard 'lane' is from a different Old English root and is not related.
In a sentence
"The cows are away down the loanin - the rain's brought them in."
Historical notes
Loanin is one of those words where the speaker tells you something about the landscape without realising. A road in Ulster is something you drive on; a lane is something a car can pass down with care; a loanin is something a tractor goes down on a wet day, and only just. The word survives best where the thing itself does: working farms, and the place-name memory of older speakers. Outsiders consistently misread it.
Alternate spellings
loaning · loanen
Sources
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry LOANING n. · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary