beadle

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See also: Beadle

English

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Alternative forms

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.

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA(key):
  • Audio (Southern England)(file)
  • Rhymes: -iːdəl

Noun

beadle (plural beadles)

  1. A parish constable, a uniformed minor (lay) official, who ushers and keeps order.
    • 1789, William Blake, “Holy Thursday”, in Songs of Innocence:
      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.
    • 1852 March – 1853 September, Charles Dickens, chapter 11, in Bleak House, London: Bradbury and Evans, , published 1853, →OCLC, page 101:
      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.
    • 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:
      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.
    • 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:
      His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman.
  2. (Scotland, ecclesiastic) An attendant to the minister.
  3. A warrant officer.

Derived terms

Translations

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Anagrams

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