What does cadie mean?
A cadie was, in Scottish usage, a boy or young man hired to run errands and carry messages through the streets, most famously in Edinburgh from roughly the seventeenth century onward. The town's cadies were a familiar feature of daily life: they gathered at well-known corners waiting for employment, some wore identifying blue coats provided by the city, and residents relied on them to deliver notes, fetch goods, and guide visitors through the labyrinthine Old Town. The word belongs to the same family as 'caddie', which began life meaning much the same thing but narrowed over time to its modern sense of a golfer's assistant. Today 'cadie' survives mostly as a historical term, met in accounts of Georgian and Victorian Edinburgh and in older Scots writing. It carries a flavour of bustling street life and humble, hard-worked labour, making it useful when writers want an authentic period detail rather than a generic 'errand boy'.
nounA cadie is a Scottish term, now largely historical, for a young man or boy employed to run errands and carry messages in a town, especially Edinburgh in the 17th–19th centuries.
- A person, especially a boy or young man, hired to run errands and deliver messages in a Scottish town.
- By extension, occasionally used of a person who loiters about the streets as a casual odd-jobber.
"In eighteenth-century Edinburgh, the cadie would wait at the street corner, ready to carry a message across the Old Town for a penny."
"The novelist sent his servant off with a cadie, trusting the boy to find the address among Edinburgh's winding closes."
"Walter Scott's writings preserve glimpses of the Edinburgh cadies, with their blue coats, waiting for hire near the Tron."
The plural follows regular English patterns and typically appears when describing the group of messengers collectively, as in accounts of old Edinburgh.
"The cadies of Edinburgh were so numerous that the town council eventually regulated their fees."
Before golfers had caddies, Edinburgh's streets had 'cadies' — hired boys who carried messages across the city for pennies, and who gave us the word we now shout on the fairway.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of cadie
'Cadie' comes from Scots, and ultimately traces back to French 'cadet', meaning a younger son or junior — a word borrowed into English as 'cadet'. In Scotland it developed to mean a junior or low-ranking helper, hence an errand-runner. Its English cousin 'caddie' shares this origin, first applied to helpers and porters generally before becoming fixed to golf in the nineteenth century. The word is thus a sibling of 'cadet' rather than a coinage of obscure origin.
How cadie is actually used
'Cadie' is chiefly of historical and regional interest: it appears mainly in writings about old Edinburgh, where the town's licensed messengers were known by this name and often wore distinctive blue coats. The standard modern spelling of the related word is 'caddie', now overwhelmingly associated with golf. Writers today use 'cadie' deliberately, usually to evoke period atmosphere.
Easily confused with cadie
'Caddie' is the standard modern spelling and today almost always means a golf assistant who carries a player's clubs, whereas 'cadie' is the older Scots spelling referring to a town errand-runner.
'Cady' is merely an alternate spelling sometimes encountered for the same word, not a separate term with its own meaning.