Noun: whittle
| Singular | whittle |
| Plural | whittles |
Sample Sentences
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Novv if any man can be ſo unkind to his ovvn Body, for I meddle not vvith your Souls, as to ſtand ſtill like a good Chriſtian, and offer his VVeeſon to a Butcher's VVhittle, I ſay no more but that he may be ſav'd, and that's the beſt can come on him. [1682 December 15 (first performance; Gregorian calendar), [John] Dryden, [Nathaniel] Lee, The Duke of Guise. A Tragedy. […], London: […] T[homas] H[odgkin] for R[ichard] Bentley […], and J[acob] Tonson […], published 1683, →OCLC, Act IV, scene i, page 50:]
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Rude whittles. [1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter III, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume (please specify |volume=I to V), London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC:]
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The Sheffield whittle was the common knife of the country, which every one carried for general purposes, who was not entitled by rank to wear a sword. [1873, Alfred Gatty, Sheffield: Past and Present:]
Nouns inflected like whittle
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
From Middle English whittel (“large knife”), an alteration of thwitel, itself from thwiten (“to whittle”), from Old English þwītan (“to strike down, whittle”), from Proto-Germanic *þwītaną, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *twey- (“to shake, hurl, toss”). Compare Old Norse þveita (“to hurl”), Ancient Greek σείω (seíō, “I shake”). Related to thwite and thwaite. See: Middle English Nouns '
whittel', Old English Nouns '
þwītan', Old Norse Nouns '
þveita'.
Verbs referencing "whittle"
Old Norse Nouns
þveit.