scot-free [ME] The people of Scotland play no part in this expression, which means ‘without suffering any punishment or injury’. The scot here is a payment corresponding to a modern tax or property rate, so scot-free was ‘tax-free’. The word came from old Scandinavian in the Anglo-Saxon period, and is the equivalent of Old English shot. The first people called Scots were an ancient Gaelic-speaking people that migrated from Ireland to the northwest of Britain around the end of the 5th century. The name appears in Latin around ad 400, and then in Old English, originally referring to Irishmen, then to the Scots in northern Britain. Scott in the exclamation Great Scott!, recorded from the 1850s in the US was simply a way to avoid saying ‘God’.