bauble

From Middle English bable, babel, babull, babulle, from Old French babel, baubel (“trinket, child's toy”), most likely a reduplication of bel, ultimately from Latin bellus (“pretty”).

• (UK) IPA^(key):
• (Scots) IPA^(key):
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈbɔbəl/
• (cot–caught merger) IPA^(key): /ˈbɑbəl/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɔːbəl
• Homophone: bobble (cot–caught merger)

bauble (plural baubles)

1. A cheap showy ornament or piece of jewellery; a gewgaw.
   • 1816 June – 1817 April/May (date written), [Mary Shelley], chapter 8, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. , volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, published 1 January 1818, →OCLC:

     […] as to the bauble on which the chief proof rests, if she had earnestly desired it, I should have willingly given it to her, so much do I esteem and value her.

   • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 6, in The History of Pendennis. , volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, , published 1849–1850, →OCLC:

     Have none before or after him staked all their treasure of life, as a savage does his land and possessions against a draught of the fair-skins’ fire-water, or a couple of bauble eyes?

   • 1977, Jimmy Webb (lyrics and music), “Highwayman”:

     Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade.

2. (figurative, by extension) Anything trivial and worthless.
   • 1841, The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, page 186:

     His hind quarters were likewise short, and not racinglike, and taken as a specimen of the horse, he was a mere bauble when looked at by the side of an English race-horse, much less a hunter.

3. A small shiny spherical decoration, commonly put on Christmas trees.
4. A club or sceptre carried by a jester.

• (showy ornament): See also: Thesaurus:trinket

• bauble on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Bauble in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition, 1911)

• bubale