Diluting juice
May 17th 2025
Early evidence for the term diluting juice, “fruit-flavoured squash”, comes from a notice in the West Lothian Courier in November 1974. This advertisement for the Cost U Less store in Linlithgow mentions that one of the ‘specials’ on offer included “large bottles diluting juice 81/2 p”.
DSL includes a couple of citations from 1998. From the Edinburgh Evening News in January we have: “Carly drinks a lot of diluting juice and I don’t know if she drank the water before we knew it was bad”. Then in July the Daily Record included the following: “I used to buy diluting juice for her lunch box, but most of the time now I end up giving her Sunny Delight and it is quite expensive”.
Sadly, a sign of the times can be seen in an appeal for food bank donations in the Paisley Daily Express in August 2017: “Urgently required today are soup, tinned fruit, jam and tinned spaghetti, which they have completely run out of. Also needed are UHT or powdered milk, diluting juice, tinned meat and fish, jars of pasta sauce, biscuits or snack bars and toiletries”.
However, on a cheerier note, in May 2022 the Daily Record reflected on a much-loved Edinburgh invention – Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial: “Many UK pubs use a shot of this pale green invention in pints of lager and lime. The diluting juice was invented in 1867 by the son of a shipbuilder [Lauchlan Rose]. He was born in Leith in 1829”.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
