Meaning

noun a young male attendant on a Scottish Highlander chief

noun a shoe without a tongue and with decorative lacing up the instep

originFrom gill (“drink measure for spirits”) + -ie; probably a nonce word coined by Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–1796) to maintain the rhyme in a poem entitled On a Scotch Bard Gone to the West Indies, first published in 1786: see the quotation.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0