A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter O

Oot

Dialect
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Out; the Scots form of "out," indicating exterior or movement from within.

Detailed Definition
"Oot" is the Scots equivalent of "out," and like "aff" and "doun," its altered vowel is a simple but crucial marker of dialect. In poetry it signals the vernacular register and contributes to the distinctive music of Scots verse. It appears in contexts of exit, exclusion, expulsion, and outdoor life, and its blunt single syllable gives it a directness suited to the open landscapes and plain-speaking voice of Scottish poetry. The word is humble but indispensable in any genuinely Scots-inflected poem.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Oot" means out; Burns uses "oot" throughout in various poems; A poet might write: "She stepped oot intae the morning rain — / and felt the year begin again." for a renewal poem; "He couldna get oot frae under the grey — / the cloud came with him every day." uses the word to describe depression spatially; "The candle went oot in the January wind — / the kind that leaves ye cold behind." creates atmosphere; "Oot wi' the old and in wi' the new — / but the old won't leave without a due." complicates the cliché; "Oot on the moor the grouse calls bright — / a free wee thing in the fading light." uses "oot" to establish open space
Additional Notes
Oot follows the same vowel-shift pattern as "aboot," "doon," "noo," and "toom" — the distinctively Scots transformation of the Standard English vowel that marks the dialect's phonological identity. In verse, "oot" can indicate physical movement (going out), exclusion (left out), or expiry (burned out), giving it a wider range than its brevity suggests. The phrase "oot and aboot" — itself a marker of Scots speech — is known well beyond Scotland as a gentle instance of dialect phonology. For students, recognising these vowel-shift patterns is the quickest route to identifying Scots dialect in written form, and "oot" is among the clearest and most frequent examples.
Also Known As
Out Outside
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