bawbeen.

Etymology: Of doubtful origin: it has been conjecturally identified with baby (with which it was sometimes identical in form in 16th cent.), derived < basse-pièce (phonetically impossible), and bas billon ‘base bullion’ or mixed metal, and from the name of a contemporary mint-master, the laird of Sillebawby. (The last conjecture is on the whole probable, and is strengthened by the similar origin of the name of the atchison n., and perhaps of the bodle n. The laird of Sillebawby (notwithstanding his designation, and its suggestion of Siller bawbee) was a real person: on 7 Sept. 1541, Kirkcaldy of Grange, the Treasurer, accounted for amounts ‘in argento receptis a Jacobo Atzinsone, et Alexandro Orok de Sillebawby respective’ (Cochran-Patrick I. 60). There is only wanting some direct proof of the abbreviation of Sillebawby to bawby. The idle surmise that the first issue bore the head of, or was issued by, an infant king, is disposed of by the preliminary fact that ‘bawbeis’ were first issued in 1541–2near the close of the reign of James V, and bore no head; moreover there exists no Scottish coin bearing a baby head. Beside the fatal phonetic objection to basse pièce, bas billon, there is not the slightest indication that the bawbeis were ever so called, and coins of billon, or base metal, had been too common for a century and a half in Scotland to make them a novelty in 1541.)