beadle – English noun declension

English noun forms of beadle

Noun: beadle
Singularbeadle
Pluralbeadles

Sample Sentences

  • Twas on a holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
  • The children walking two and two in red and blue and green:
  • Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
  • Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow. [1789, William Blake, “Holy Thursday”, in Songs of Innocence:]
  • The beadle […] generally understood in the neighbourhood to be a ridiculous institution […] The policeman considers him an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the barbarous watchmen times, but gives him admission as something that must be borne with until government shall abolish him. [1852 March – 1853 September, Charles Dickens, chapter 11, in Bleak House, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1853, →OCLC, page 101:]
  • Yes, yes, begad—of course you go out with him—it’s like the country, you know; everybody goes out with everybody in the Gardens, and there are beadles, you know, and that sort of thing—everybody walks in the Temple Gardens. [1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 54, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume II, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC, page 142:]
  • His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. [1929 September, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, uniform edition, London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, […], published 1931 (April 1935 printing), →OCLC, page 9:]

Etymology

From Middle English bedel, bidel, from Old English bydel (“warrant officer, apparitor”), from Proto-West Germanic *budil, from Proto-Germanic *budilaz (“herald”), equivalent to bid + -le. Cognate with Dutch beul, German Büttel. More at bid. See: Middle English Nouns 'bedel', Old English Nouns 'bydel', Dutch Nouns 'beul', German Nouns 'Büttel'.