dottle
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of dottle
1815–25; dial. dot small lump (probably identical with dot 1 ) + -le
Explanation
Use the noun dottle to describe the leftover, unburnt tobacco that's left in a pipe after it's been smoked. Your grandfather might knock the dottle from his pipe into the kitchen trash can every afternoon. Dottle is a very old-fashioned word that's specific to a fairly old-fashioned activity, pipe smoking. A well-packed pipe is meant to burn all the tobacco in its bowl, but sometimes there's a damp wad of smelly dottle left behind. The word, which is rarely used these days, was originally dossil, from the French word dosil, "a spigot or plug in a vessel." It became a pipe-smoking term in the early nineteenth century.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The author of Crazy Like a Fox and Chicken Inspector No. 23 and the maestro of words such as wattles and dottle, boffin and horripilating was surely up to the challenge.
From Time Magazine Archive
And there is Grandma from Sweden who chews pipe dottle and comes to Denmark fully intending to die, but lives on to plague and embarrass the boy's mother with her unhousebroken back-country habits.
From Time Magazine Archive
Nearly anyone could be a ventriloquist if one's dummy talked like this: "How 'dout a dottle of deer?"
From Time Magazine Archive
At his Pentagon desk, Burke smacks the dottle from his pipe against his heavy Annapolis ring, looks far beyond today's Navy and sees Nautilus as the forerunner of the all nuclear fleet.
From Time Magazine Archive
In the subsequent smokes the ashes, "dottle," were saved, being placed in a small depression in the floor, but were not again put in the pipe.
From Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1895-1896, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1898, pages 519-744 by Jesse Walter Fewkes
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
