The ubiquitous language of the Tartan Dictionary — one concept, one name. The tiers run from the
loosest grouping down to a real piece of cloth: bands → stripe pattern → sett → tartan → variant →
attestation.
The hierarchy
| Term | Meaning |
|---|
| Band | One colour of the six base colours (R O Y G B plus black/white/neutral) — the coarsest colour resolution. |
| Bands | A sett's colour sequence read in the six base colours, e.g. KR. The loosest "same design?" grouping; lives under /bands/. |
| Stripe | One run of a single colour within the sett — a colour code and an even thread count, e.g. R14. |
| Stripe pattern | A sett's colour sequence read in the ~25 named human-palette shades (Maroon, Navy, Bottle …), e.g. DR R K. Finer than bands; reduces to its bands by colouring each slot down. Lives under /stripes/. |
| Sett | The complete repeating unit of a tartan — the structure (stripe order) in human colours with thread counts, dye- and loom-independent. The base unit is 1 and the overall scale rides as an ×N multiplier on the sett, never on the tartan. |
| Tartan | A named design: a stripe pattern bound to a master (exemplar) sett, with family/clan and age. |
| Variant | One concrete colouring of a sett (sett + grid/idealised palette) — a record of the idea. |
| Attestation | A real, found instance of a sett — its measured colours, how it was woven, and the evidence for it. |
Structure and notation
| Term | Meaning |
|---|
| Thread count | A sett written as a colour-and-count sequence, e.g. R14 DB2 R4 … — the band definitions (colour codes) interleaved with their thread counts. |
| Pivot | An end point of a reflective sett about which the pattern mirrors. Written with / in the Register notation. |
| Reflective sett | A sett that mirrors about its first and last pivots; it has defined end points. |
| Repeating sett | A sett that simply repeats, with no privileged start — any rotation is the same pattern. |
| Palette | The mapping from colour codes to concrete RGB colours. A normalised sett carries no palette of its own: its codes are the named human-palette shades. |
| Normalisation | Reducing an equivalent-but-differently-written sett to one canonical representative, so it can serve as an identity (the /setts/ URL). |
| Reduction | Dividing a sett through by its GCD to its smallest integer proportion, to compare shape independent of absolute scale. |
| Twill (2/2) | The weave that offsets the over/under by one thread each row, giving tartan's diagonal structure. The dictionary covers only 2/2-twill, symmetric setts. |
| Pattern | Historical / loose. The old single "unit of meaning" tier; now split into the explicit bands (base-six) and stripe pattern (human-palette) tiers above. |
People and provenance
| Term | Meaning |
|---|
| 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 family-to-place bond over time, distinct from the building itself. |
| Source | The provenance of a variant or attestation: a specific kilt, plaid, pattern book, or register entry. |
The human palette
The named mid-range tier the stripe patterns are read in: the eleven Berlin & Kay basic colour
terms, their light/dark relatives, and the two between-hue variations T (Teal, blue-green) and
M (Magenta, purple-red). A D_ prefix is the dark rung, L_ the light rung.
| Code | Name | sRGB |
|---|
| K | Black | #000000 |
| N | Grey | #636363 |
| W | White | #F7F7F7 |
| DR | Maroon | #55120C |
| R | Red | #D60020 |
| LR | Pink | #FF9C97 |
| DO | Brown | #412714 |
| O | Orange | #A65C11 |
| LO | Peach | #FF9C34 |
| DY | Olive | #3A2B0D |
| Y | Yellow | #8B6E00 |
| LY | Lemon | #DCBC32 |
| DG | Bottle | #053819 |
| G | Green | #008B2A |
| LG | Lime | #82D67A |
| DT | Petrol | #023535 |
| T | Teal | #00879F |
| LT | Aqua | #64D1D9 |
| DB | Navy | #082077 |
| B | Blue | #466CC8 |
| LB | Sky | #B5BBDE |
| DP | Aubergine | #4B0B4F |
| P | Purple | #AA2DBD |
| LP | Lilac | #E4A6DB |
| M | Magenta | #CA047B |