hammercloth

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English

The hammercloth on this coach is red

Alternative forms

hammer-cloth

Etymology

Probably from Dutch hemel (heaven, canopy, tester) (akin to German Himmel, and perhaps also to English heaven) + cloth; or perhaps a corruption of hamper cloth.

Noun

hammercloth (plural hammercloths)

  1. (archaic, historical) The cloth that covers a coachbox.
    • 1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter XX, in Great Expectations , volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, , published October 1861, →OCLC:
      Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman, who seemed to have as many capes to his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me up in his coach and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of steps, as if he were going to take me fifty miles. His getting on his box, which I remember to have been decorated with an old weather-stained pea-green hammercloth, moth-eaten into rags, was quite a work of time.
    • 1898, Kate Douglas Wiggin, chapter 6, in Penelope’s Progress , Boston, Mass., New York, N.Y.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company , →OCLC:
      The mulberry-colored coach, apparently not too large for what it contained, though she alone was in it; the handsome, jolly coachman and his splendid hammer-cloth loaded with lace

References