mallet
Americannoun
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a hammerlike tool with a head commonly of wood but occasionally of rawhide, plastic, etc., used for driving any tool with a wooden handle, as a chisel, or for striking a surface.
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the wooden implement used to strike the balls in croquet.
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Polo. the long-handled stick, or club, used to drive the ball.
noun
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a tool resembling a hammer but having a large head of wood, copper, lead, leather, etc, used for driving chisels, beating sheet metal, etc
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a long stick with a head like a hammer used to strike the ball in croquet or polo
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a very large powerful steam locomotive with a conventional boiler but with two separate articulated engine units
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of mallet
1375–1425; late Middle English maillet < Middle French, equivalent to mail maul + -et -et
Explanation
A mallet is a tool with a large, barrel-shaped, head — used to pound on something. You might use a mallet to strike an instrument or in playing croquet. Yeah, right. A mallet is a long-handled implement with a barrel-shaped head used in games like croquet or polo. In music, a mallet is a stick with a rounded end that is sometimes padded, used to strike percussion instruments like timpani, bells, or a marimba. Use your yarn or rubber mallets to play the marimba, and use your wooden mallets to play the xylophone.
Vocabulary lists containing mallet
100 Great Words from "Fahrenheit 451" -- Part I Vocabulary
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Chains
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The Shining
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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.
See Examples For:
Alternatively, use a meat mallet to flatten and add a pattern to the cookies.
From Salon ● Dec. 13, 2025
Danger feels suspended in the soft-blue light, in which the lion’s tail and the round, silvery moon, balanced just-so, are poised like a raised mallet and gong.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 15, 2025
But it was a switch from his trusted blade to a mallet putter "to help him with lining up putts" that really sparked a change in fortunes.
From BBC ● Jul. 15, 2025
In his memoir, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics,” Biden acknowledged discovering a polo mallet, riding breeches and other markers of a privileged life in his father’s closet.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 13, 2024
When he got frustrated, which happened about every five seconds, he could hit stuff with his mallet and the other crew members would figure he was working, not throwing a tantrum.
From "Blood of Olympus" by Rick Riordan
At St. Anne School in Santa Monica, I watched Cummins harness the squirmy energy of second-graders wielding xylophone mallets.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 21, 2026
Santoor is a trapezoid-shaped stringed musical instrument, similar to a dulcimer, which is played with mallets.
From BBC ● Jul. 26, 2025
As three people struck wood with mallets under a viaduct in Queens during the morning rush hour one day in the fall, a man walked up and asked, “What do you call this music?”
From New York Times ● Apr. 11, 2024
He holds small mallets in his “hands” to play a kind of xylophone called a marimba.
From NewsForKids.net ● Apr. 1, 2024
Within reach of his fists all day, pounding chisel against stone with great heavy mallets instead of fashioning leaves or watching the gold turn crimson in the crucible?
From "The Golden Goblet" by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
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.
