For the kid who snuck some extra cookies and the dog who just chewed up the couch cushions, there are grand hopes of getting off scot-free. This expression relates to doing something bad without suffering any consequences. But despite the spelling of “scot,” the phrase didn’t originate in Scotland — it comes from a term used a few hundred miles away in Scandinavia.
The phrase “scot-free” is rooted in the Old Norse language, which was spoken across Scandinavia from roughly the ninth to 13th centuries. Around the 10th century, the word skot, meaning “payment,” made its way over to the British Isles, where it was anglicized as scot. There, it was used for a royal tax levied on locals. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this gave rise to the Old English term scotfreo, meaning “tax free.”
As Old English evolved into Middle and then Modern English, the term developed a new spelling and meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary points to several spellings from the 16th century where it was written as “scott fre” and “scotchfree” (still no relation to Scotland). The phrase came to mean “getting away with anything,” whether it be avoiding one’s taxes or getting away with a crime. One of the earliest figurative uses appears in a 1567 natural history book titled A Greene Forest by John Maplet: “Daniell scaped scotchfree by Gods prouidence.”
Today, people rarely use “scot-free” with regard to avoiding one’s taxes, though it could certainly still apply in the right circumstances. (By the way, if the IRS is reading this, just know that I would never try to get off scot-free.) In most instances, the phrase has shed its original meaning and is now almost always used in the sense of getting away with criminal or wrongful activity without punishment.
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