I must admit that I got "mickle" wrong in one of my earlier posts in this thread. There's a well-known saying, "Many a mickle maks a muckle," and I therefore assumed (as I think many people do)that "mickle" meant a small quantity, so that the saying translates as, "Many small things can make a big one," — the sort of thing people say about saving money, for example. Not so, though. Chambers Dictionary says for "mickle": "*mickle*... adj. much: great. — n. a great quantity. — adv. much. Scot *muckle*. — "many a little (or pickle) makes a mickle" (often absurdly "many a mickle makes a muckle"), "every little helps". The Scots dictionary at http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/ simply lists "mickle" as a variant of "muckle", so that muckle, mickle and meikle are all just common forms of the same word, together with other spellings such as mukle, mukkel, meikill, mikil, and mykil. Norman Tulloch