Scran

Scran is a term used in Scotland and parts of Northern England to refer to food or a meal. In everyday speech, people might say “eat your scran” or “get some scran,” and the word frequently appears in humor, literature, and informal conversation. The origin of scran as slang is uncertain, but it has been a staple of Scots dialect for generations.

In addition to its culinary meaning, scran has cultural prominence as the name of a digital archive. SCRAN (often styled as SCRAN) refers to a Scottish cultural resources project that created a digital collection of media relating to Scotland’s heritage. The archive gathers images, film, and audio, alongside descriptive metadata, to support education, research, and public access to cultural resources. It has been described as a repository of thousands of items spanning historical photographs, documentary footage, music, and other material that illustrate social, economic, and cultural life in Scotland and, to some extent, Ireland.

The SCRAN archive emerged in the late 1990s as a collaborative effort among educational and cultural organizations to provide online access to heritage materials. It was designed to support schools, researchers, and museums by offering searchable media with contextual information and licensing suitable for educational use. Over time, SCRAN content has been accessed through partnerships with libraries and museums and integrated into broader digital heritage initiatives.

Today, the term scran remains widely used in casual Scottish speech for food, while SCRAN continues to be recognized as a historical and educational digital resource related to Scotland’s cultural heritage.