Scran
"Food, especially a meal."
Heard widely across Northern England and Scotland, and long embedded in British Army and Royal Navy slang for rations. Its earliest recorded sense, from the early 1700s, actually referred to a tavern bill or reckoning rather than food itself, and by the early 1800s it had shifted to mean food, typically scrappy leftovers or odds and ends rather than a proper spread. Most etymologists trace it to Old Norse "skran," meaning junk or rubbish, though a competing theory points instead to Dutch "schranzen."
Myth vs. FactA frequently repeated claim is that SCRAN is a naval acronym for 'Sultanas, Currants, Raisins And Nuts.' It isn't. There's no documentary evidence for the acronym at all, and the word was already in use, in its food sense, more than a century before anyone suggested it stood for anything.
Sources: Documented in early 18th-century tavern-bill usage and 19th-century military slang; Old Norse 'skran' root discussed in etymological scholarship.
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