Sot Weed and Little Ladell: Two Forgotten Tobacco Terms

Sot weed and little ladell are two expressions found in English tobacco and pipe texts from the 16th through the 18th century. The first names the tobacco plant; the second describes the implement used for smoking it. Because both carry the outlook of the period in which they were written, neither passed into the language of later generations, and their meanings can only be worked out by consulting period sources.

Sot Weed: The Stupefying Herb

In English, sot means "a drunkard, a fool"; the word's root lies in the Old English form sott, meaning "fool." The compound sot-weed is given directly in dictionaries as a synonym for tobacco. The name is understood not to be neutral: it comes not from tobacco's champions but from the language of those opposed to it.

The term became established in the years when tobacco was simultaneously a source of fortune and controversy in the English colonies. John Rolfe's planting in the colony of the seeds of a sweet-leaved variety grown in Trinidad, turning it into a crop under the name Orinoco, made Virginia tobacco a lucrative export item; the first shipment to England, in March 1614, was four barrels, rising to 20,000 pounds by 1617 and 40,000 pounds the following year. In Maryland, tobacco was a direct means of payment: George Alsop, who arrived in the colony as an indentured servant, reports in his 1666 promotional tract that trade ran not on coin but on tobacco.

The middleman in this trade was called a factor, a commission agent. The two words were joined together in Ebenezer Cooke's long satire published in London in 1708: The Sot-Weed Factor tells, in mocking couplets, of the disillusionment of an English merchant who went to Maryland seeking his fortune; it is regarded as a parody of the period's writing that promoted the colonies as a land of easy gain, and as one of the earliest American satires. John Barth gave the same title to his 1960 novel; set in the London and Maryland of the 1680s and 1690s, this book brought the term back into circulation. The word also entered the period's dictionaries; Francis Grose's 1811 compendium of street slang, records indicate, gives it as a synonym for tobacco.

Little Ladell: The First Pipe, Likened to a Ladle

Ladle means, well, a ladle. In the years tobacco reached England, the implement used to smoke it did not yet have a name; early testimonies therefore recorded not what the implement was but what it resembled. John Sparke, who chronicled John Hawkins's 1565 voyage to the West Indies, reports that the people of Florida burned a dried plant and drew the smoke through a reed fitted with an earthen cup at its end; here too it is not a name but the parts that are described.

The same approach continued in England. Clergyman and chronicler William Harrison (1534-1593), in his unfinished chronology, writes that drawing the smoke of the Indian herb through an implement "shaped like a small ladle" had become widespread in the country. Some sources date this entry to 1573, while some accounts give 1578.

There is a concrete basis for the comparison: early clay pipe bowls were tiny and shallow compared to today's, holding only a few pinches since tobacco was expensive. Bowl size grew over the centuries as tobacco became cheaper. Alfred Dunhill, in his 1924 book The Pipe Book, suggested that this ladle shape may have originated from production in the English town of Broseley; records show the first trace of a pipemaker in Broseley dating to 1590.

The Trace of the Terms

Neither term carried over into later centuries. Sot weed named not a plant but the judgment leveled against it; as tobacco became an everyday consumer product, the meaning of that judgment faded as well. Little ladell, meanwhile, was never a name to begin with but a temporary description; once the implement came to be called "pipe," the comparison was no longer invoked. For the story of that name itself, see the origin of the word "pipe" entry; for an example of a similar shift in meaning, see the Stummel entry.