Stour
Dust. Especially the dry, fine, lifted-by-wind kind found on country roads, in old houses, and after a bag of cement has been opened. 'A cloud of stour' is what an unmade road throws up behind a car.
Etymology
From Old French 'estour' meaning a fight, conflict, or tumult - the same root that gives 'stir' in modern English. The Scots and Ulster Scots sense drifted from 'commotion' to 'the dust raised by commotion' to just 'dust'. Standard English lost the word in favour of the simpler 'dust'; Scots and Ulster Scots kept it, especially for the air-borne lifted variety.
In a sentence
"The dog came in covered in stour - the road's been baked dry for a fortnight."
Historical notes
Stour is one of the small Ulster Scots vocabulary items where English-elsewhere uses the obvious word and the dialect uses a more specific one. 'Dust' covers everything from skin-flakes to powder; 'stour' is specifically the dry, fine, blown-around kind. The word survives in older Ulster speech and in dialect writing. Modern younger speakers may know the word from grandparents but use 'dust' themselves.
Sources
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry STOUR n. · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary