Noun: bagatelle
| Singular | bagatelle |
| Plural | bagatelles |
Sample Sentences
-
Sir C. Oh! dear madam, don't ask me, it's a very foolish song—a mere bagatelle.
-
Char. Oh! Sir Callaghan, I will admit of no excuse. [1782, Charles Macklin, Love a-la-Mode, page 21:]
-
[…] the jails were larger and fuller, the number of murders was incomparably greater, the thefts and swindlings in the old country were a bagatelle to the large depredations there […] [1850, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 68, page 226:]
-
The repayment of the cost of the western part of the road, whatever it might be, would be a mere bagatelle, for the older provinces would have been enriched by the stimulus given to business by the opening up of the plains,[…] [1879 September 6, “Railway Projects”, in Railway World, 5 (36): 853:]
-
They'd purchased a little house in the eighth arrondissement in Paris that for them was just a bagatelle, since they rarely lived there. [1996, Edmund White, “The tea ceremony”, in Ploughshares, volume 22, number 1, page 190:]
-
One afternoon in 1920. a young pianist sat down in a shuttered room in the capital of defeated Germany and played a Bagatelle by Beethoven. [2007, Norman Lebrecht, The Life And Death of Classical Music, page 7:]
-
For some time they did nothing save box, but at last they went down to the bagatelle room, and played bagatelle for a bit. They marked this advance in civilization by prodding holes in the ceiling with the bagatelle cues, which gave the ceiling the appearance of a cloth target after a Gatling gun had been shooting at it. [1895, Hugh Legge, “The Repton Club”, in John Matthew Knapp, editor, The Universities and the Social Problem, page 139:]
Nouns inflected like bagatelle
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
Borrowed from French bagatelle, from Italian bagattella. See: French Nouns '
bagatelle', Italian Nouns '
bagattella'.