Absquatulate
verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 To leave quickly or in a hurry; to depart, flee. intransitive, slang
"Even within the past year, several Land Officers and keepers of public monies--the Collector of New Orleans and Plattsburg--the Post Masters of Mobile and Worcester have made serious and prominent additions to the long catalogue of absquatulating defaulters."
- 2 run away; usually includes taking something or somebody along wordnet
Example
More examples"Even within the past year, several Land Officers and keepers of public monies--the Collector of New Orleans and Plattsburg--the Post Masters of Mobile and Worcester have made serious and prominent additions to the long catalogue of absquatulating defaulters."
Etymology
Attested since the 1830s in American English, a jocular mock-Latin word. Blend of abscond + squat + perambulate, as ab- (“away (from)”) (as in abscond) + squat + *-ulate (as in perambulate, properly -ate), hence meaning “get up (from a squat) and depart (quickly)”. The middle portion was perhaps influenced by -le (“(frequentative)”) and the dialectal term squattle (“depart”); compare contemporary skedaddle.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.