A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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hairst
Hairst is the Scots word for harvest, and by extension for autumn itself, the season being named for the work that fills it. It covers the cutting, the gathering, and the weeks around them, and it is still in use in rural Scotland and in the northeast in particular.
Etymology
It is the same word as English harvest, arrived at through Scots sound changes. The point worth noticing is what the word originally meant, which is the season and not the crop: harvest was simply the English name for autumn for most of a thousand years, exactly as hairst still is in Scots. Autumn came in later from French and Latin, and fall is a seventeenth-century English coinage that crossed the Atlantic and stayed there while Britain dropped it.
Notes
So English once named a season for what people were doing in it, then borrowed a Latin word and stopped. Scots kept the older arrangement, and the Scots calendar has a set of these: voar for spring, simmer, hairst, and winter. The last sheaf cut at the end of hairst was dressed as a figure and kept in the house until the next year.