The claim that the Inuit have 50 words for snow has endured for decades, but it now looks as if the Scots have beaten that figure. Researchers on a new Scots thesaurus say they have found more than 400 Scots words for the white stuff, from “feefle” to “flindrikin”, “spitters” to “snaw-pouther”.

Academics compiling the first Historical Thesaurus of Scots, which will include every word in the Scots language from earliest records until today, claim they have found 421 Scots words for snow. Other examples include “snaw” and “sneesl”, meaning to begin to rain or snow, and “skelf”, a large snowflake.

No matter the type of snow, there is a Scots word for it, according to the thesaurus, whether it is “feefle” (to swirl, as of snow round a corner), “flindrikin” (a slight snow shower), “spitters” (small drops or flakes of wind-driven rain or snow) or “snaw-pouther” (fine driving snow).

“Feuchter” is defined as “to fall lightly, to come down in odd flakes”, “snaw-ghast” is an apparition seen in the snow, and “blin-drift” means drifting snow.

Ahead of the online launch of the first part of the thesaurus on 23 September, the University of Glasgow said the 421 snow descriptions meant that “Scots beat Inuit in the number of words for snow”. The theory that the Inuits have 50 different words for snow originated in 1911, when anthropologist Frank Boas published his Handbook of North American Indians; 80 years later, it was deconstructed by Geoffrey Pullum’s The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

“Weather has been a vital part of people’s lives in Scotland for centuries,” said Dr Susan Rennie, lecturer in English and Scots language at the University of Glasgow. “The number and variety of words in the language show how important it was for our ancestors to communicate about the weather, which could so easily affect their livelihoods.”

The first two categories on the website for the Historical Thesaurus of Scots will be weather and sport, because, said the University of Glasgow, the subjects have been “two key talking points for Scots across the centuries”. The “sport” with the most Scots words, it revealed, is marbles, an activity that turns out to have 369 different items of vocabulary, including “runtit” (having lost all one’s marbles to one’s opponent) and “nieve” (a method of cheating in delivering the shot by advancing the hand too far).

“You might expect sports like football and golf to loom large in the thesaurus, but it turns out that there are more words relating to marbles - which is an indication of how popular the game has been with generations of Scottish children,” said Rennie.

The thesaurus is based on the content of the Dictionary of the Scots Language, but researchers are also appealing for members of the public to come forward with suggestions of words that have not yet been included.

“There may be other words out there that we are not yet aware of, and that is where we would welcome the support of the public. If they use or remember words for particular sports or weather, we would love to hear about them,” said Rennie.

