Batlet
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A short bat for beating clothes when washing them.
"Clo[wn]. And I mine: I remember when I was in loue, I broke my ſword vpon a ſtone, and bid him take that for comming a night to Iane Smile, and I remember the kiſſing of her batler [var. batlet], and the Cowes dugs that her prettie chopt hands had milk’d; […]"
Example
More examples"Clo[wn]. And I mine: I remember when I was in loue, I broke my ſword vpon a ſtone, and bid him take that for comming a night to Iane Smile, and I remember the kiſſing of her batler [var. batlet], and the Cowes dugs that her prettie chopt hands had milk’d; […]"
Etymology
From bat + -let. Probably a spurious word, in the 20th century reborrowed from word-lists. Both this and batler are only known from the same Shakespeare locus; neither is it known that battler means a fuller’s beetle but him who beetles or “posses” the clothes. However for the meaning of a flat cuboid on a handle to clean textiles by muscles battril, which could be a metathesis of batler, is known to have been used in the Lancashire dialect, such as by Tim Bobbin on multiple occasions.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.