Glossary of terms
The vocabulary this site uses for tartan and its structure — one concept, one name. If a term on a sett, family or TTD page is unfamiliar, it is defined here. The dictionary's whole approach is to read a tartan by its pattern rather than its name or its exact thread count, and several of these terms are the pieces of that idea.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sett | The complete repeating unit of a tartan pattern — the design that tiles across the cloth. |
| Thread count | The sett written as a colour-and-count sequence, e.g. R14 DB2 R4 …. The dictionary's identifier. |
| Stripe | One run of a single colour within the sett (a colour code + an even thread count, e.g. R14). |
| Band | A wider stripe or block of one colour — the big areas of a sett (the red and green grounds), as opposed to the thin overcheck lines. |
| Pivot | An end point of a reflective sett about which the pattern mirrors. Written with / in the Register notation (R/14). |
| Reflective sett | A sett that mirrors about its first and last pivots; it has defined end points. |
| Repeating sett | A sett that simply repeats; it has no privileged start, so any rotation is the same pattern. |
| Palette | The mapping from colour codes (R, DB, LB, G, …) to concrete colours for a given variant. |
| Colourway | One palette of a sett — the same structure dyed in different shades (e.g. a bright kilt vs a weathered, muted re-dye). |
| Normalisation | Reducing an equivalent-but-differently-written sett to one canonical form, so it can serve as an identity. |
| Reduction | Dividing a sett through to its smallest whole-number pattern (its GCD) to compare shape independent of absolute scale. |
| Pattern | The dictionary's unit of meaning: the design abstracted from a sett — relative stripe sizes and colour roles, with absolute size and exact shades factored out. It groups the many weavings of one design. |
| Twill (2/2) | The weave that offsets the over/under by one thread each row, giving tartan its diagonal structure. The dictionary covers 2/2-twill, symmetric setts. |
| Tartan | One normalised thread count — a specific structural form that expresses a pattern. |
| Variant | One concrete colouring of a tartan (thread count + palette) — a record of the idea: a particular kilt, plaid or register entry. |
| ΔTartan | The dictionary's distance between two cloths — how far apart two variants sit in pattern-and-colour space; small means near-identical, larger means a different proportion or colourway. |
| Family | A set of tartans associated with a family over more than a couple of generations. |
| Seat | The place a family takes its territorial designation from — a castle, tower house or house held long enough to name the line (e.g. Megginch, Drummond Castle). The seat is the bond between family and place over time, distinct from the building itself. |
| Source | The provenance of a variant: a specific kilt, plaid, pattern book, or register entry. |
| Register / RO / STA | External tartan registers the dictionary cross-references — the Scottish Register of Tartans (RO), the former Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) and Society records. A registry number keys a sett, not a colourway. |