Do you like words? Pretty ones? “Forgotten” ones? Alternatives to overused words you just can’t stop yourself from using during a first draft? Welcome to the first of the Really Good Words posts, where I share my research rabbit holes about “obsolete” words I find and fact-check.
This is also where I’ll share how my research warps start and the overall path I take while finding an answer.
So… about my process…
I’ll be the first to admit my thought journey isn’t always the smoothest or fastest. Sometimes, I’ll branch off and find something related, but irrelevant to the main topic. However, I’ve found over the years that this method has helped me gain a fuller understanding of whatever I’m researching. Funnily enough, I started doing this while writing for video games. When I was doing contract work for Firaxis on Civilization VI: Rise and Fall, there were a lot of times when a quick web search didn’t have the answers (or at least answers from reliable sources). There were quite a few times when I found secondary sources that conflicted with primary sources, and I had to track down where certain facts originated. Even on a game like Matchington Mansion, I spent a lot of time researching and compiling documents on the history of architecture, art, and cultural trends using the same methods I did on Civ.
Without further rambling, here’s what I found out about the word “Respair.”
Obsolete Word: Respair
(n) To recover from despair
If you search for the word “respair,” you’ll notice quite a few companies having fun with how they can use it to create clever wordplay with their name or tagline. You’ll also find many blogs featuring the word respair in word collections or as an opening pitch for a few books. What you will have trouble finding is a cited definition.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has it locked behind a paywall (I didn’t know dictionaries had those now), but it does helpfully note in the free factsheet that the word is a noun (occasionally documented as a verb during the Middle English period) and was “only recorded in the early 1500s.”1 The OED also states that their “only evidence for respair is from before 1525, in the writing of Andrew of Wyntoun, prior of St Serf’s, Lochleven, and historian.”2
Now, I could keep searching directly for a reputable source of the definition… or I could look into this Andrew of Wyntoun who apparently used it sometime before the 1500s—which, funny that, a quick search reveals he was a Scottish writer who was born in 1350 and died in 1423.3 So, when OED says it was “only recorded in the early 1500s,” I’m a bit confused (spoiler alert, I’m about to be even more confused after later searches, but we’ll get to that).
According to Britannica, Andrew of Wyntoun was a chronicler who wrote the Orygynale Cronykil, or “The Original Chronicle of Scotland.” This is a multi-volume history of Scotland that potentially served as the original source for the encounter between Macbeth and the weird sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (I say potentially here, because further searching suggests multiple possible sources and I’m not doing a deep dive).4 The article also says there are nine books in the Orygynale Cronykil, while old reliable Wikipedia states there are eleven manuscripts. Wikipedia cites that they got it from a scan of A Presentation of the Grammatical Inflexion in Androw of Wyntoun’s “Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland“—and yes, the spelling of that is intentional.5 What’s interesting about this new source is that, when reading it, you can find out differences between some of the earlier editions published up to 1898. For example, the version you can find on Google Books is edited by David Laing, published in 1872, and comprising three volumes.6 Hudnall notes that the previous version by David Macpherson, “suppressed in the first five Books all matter foreign to the British Isles (nearly one-third of the entire work) retaining only the metrical contents of chapters.”7 The version by Laing is the first complete edition. It’s so complete that, after exploring it, I noticed that Laing even retained Macpherson’s preface to his 1795 edition.
Why note all of this? I’d like to explain by highlighting Hudnall’s words about the Orygynale Cronykil:
“The poetical worth of Wyntoun’s “Cronykil” is far superceded by its historical, linguistic, and literary value. As a monument of history it is to be observed: Wyntoun was the first to give his countrymen a continuous history—written with a strictly historical purpose—of national, or rather international events in his own vernacular.”8
This brings me back to my original search for “respair.” I wasn’t able to find it within the search function on the Google Books version, so I kept looking elsewhere, eventually landing on a scan of the 1914 edition by F.J. Amours from the National Library of Scotland.
There, in the glossary, I finally found:
“Respayr, v. to hope again, iv. 1590 (respair, s. E2).”9
Unfortunately, this is the only mention of either version of the word in that text. Even searching the previous texts for “respayr” and trying new searches turned up nothing. However, I was finally able to find a new dictionary entry, specifically, from the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, and this finally gave me a quote from one a certain chronicler,
“Sa Rome befor dispayrit than Respayr in gud hope began [E.2 Respair hade in gude hope agane].”10
Did I need to research all of this just to figure out the truth behind the word respair? No, but it felt important. There are far too many instances in which I find that words, common phrases, and “facts” have gone through a worldwide web game of telephone, with one source citing another without checking its validity. Generally, this isn’t done maliciously, but the end result is the same: misinformation spreads. With the rapid spread of information and the introduction of AI hallucinations, practicing research methods is essential. Sure, on my blog I’ll be documenting words and interesting tidbits. Little things like these are how I practice searching for the big things, like the accuracy of current-events reports.
On a lighter note, I’ll always remember how to spell “despair” now (I always want to spell it with an ‘i’), since I had to search for “respair” so many times.
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Respair,” accessed June 10, 2026, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/respair_n?tab=factsheet ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Britannica Editors. “Andrew of Wyntoun.” Encyclopedia Britannica, April 16, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-of-Wyntoun. ↩︎
- Ibed. ↩︎
- Ibed.; Wikipedia. 2001. “Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland.” Last modified January 24, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orygynale_Cronykil_of_Scotland. ; Hudnall, Richard H, “A Presentation of the Grammatical Inflexions in Androw of Wyntoun’s “Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland”. Inaugural Dissertation Presented to the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig for the Acquisition of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.” (Leipzig : Druck von Oswald Schmidt, 1898), 10, HathiTrust. ↩︎
- https://books.google.co.zw/books?id=me5JAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false ↩︎
- Hudnall, Richard H, “A Presentation of the Grammatical Inflexions in Androw of Wyntoun’s “Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland”. Inaugural Dissertation Presented to the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig for the Acquisition of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.” (Leipzig : Druck von Oswald Schmidt, 1898), 11, HathiTrust. ↩︎
- Ibed. 12 ↩︎
- Amours, F.J., “The Original Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun Printed on Parallel Pages from the Cottonian and Wemyss MSS., with the Variants of the Other Texts.” (William Blackwood and Sons, 1914), 182, The National Library of Scotland. ↩︎
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language, s.v. “Respair,” accessed June 10, 2026, https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/respair ↩︎
