These thick manuscript volumes were written by three clerks (James Connell, Evander McLeod and another) under the supervision of the Reverend Dr John MacLeod of Dundonald. They were part of the final draft of the Highland Society of Scotland Dictionary, and were transcribed between June 1822 and June 1823 from materials prepared by MacLeod and Ewen MacLachlan (see below). Corrections appear in MacLeod’s hand; he complained that it took him two days to correct what his clerks wrote in four (Ingliston MS. A.i.4, number 178).

In preparing the material for the press during 1824-1827 Mackintosh MacKay entered copious additions and corrections on slips or strips pasted to the outer edges of the leaves, thus adding a margin 9 centimetres wide and radically revising his predecessors’ eight years of work.

At Ewen MacLachlan’s death on 29th March 1822, he had written out the completed work on ‘A’-‘F’ in two folio volumes; MacLeod was then working on ‘P’-‘U’, with only ‘T’ and ‘U’ to finish, and MacLachlan himself on ‘G’-‘O’, but his papers were found to be in confusion, with a good deal of work still to be done. For this reason, while MacLeod and his clerks produced the present draft of ‘A’-‘F’ and ‘P’-‘U’, work on ‘G’-‘O’ was farmed out to Friar Alexander MacDonald and the Reverend Alexander Irvine, see Adv.MS.73.3.4, 73.3.6.