Bedtick
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A sheet used for enclosing the materials of a mattress, such as straw.
"March 25, 1894, Alexander Berkman, "letter to Fedy", republished in 1912 in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist Sleepless, I toss on the withered mattress. The ravages of time and the weight of many inmates have demoralized it out of all semblance of a bedtick. But the Block Captain persistently ignores my request for new straw, directing me to "shake it up a bit.""
Example
More examples"March 25, 1894, Alexander Berkman, "letter to Fedy", republished in 1912 in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist Sleepless, I toss on the withered mattress. The ravages of time and the weight of many inmates have demoralized it out of all semblance of a bedtick. But the Block Captain persistently ignores my request for new straw, directing me to "shake it up a bit.""
Etymology
From bed + tick.
More for "bedtick"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.