Sootball

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A ball of soot or ash.

    "If you tell Brown and me (as you have) that the doctor is a dram-drinker, what is to hinder us from telling the story to others, with a few embellishments, perhaps ? And so the snowball (the sootball rather) would be set rolling."

Example

More examples

"If you tell Brown and me (as you have) that the doctor is a dram-drinker, what is to hinder us from telling the story to others, with a few embellishments, perhaps ? And so the snowball (the sootball rather) would be set rolling."

Etymology

From soot + ball.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.