plouter

• pleiter, plotter, plowter

Probably from plout +‎ -er.

plouter (third-person singular simple present plouters, present participle ploutering, simple past and past participle ploutered)

1. (Scotland, Ireland, Northern England, dialect) To splash around in something wet; to dabble.
   • 1894 May, Rudyard Kipling, “Servants of the Queen”, in The Jungle Book, London, New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published June 1894, →OCLC, page 187:

     As I did not want to plowter about any more in the drizzle and the dark, I put my waterproof over the muzzle of one gun, and made a sort of wigwam with two or three rammers that I found, and lay along the tail of another gun, wondering where Vixen had got to, and where I might be.

2. (Scotland, Ireland, Northern England, dialect) To potter.
   • 1847 December, Ellis Bell [pseudonym; Emily Brontë], chapter IX, in Wuthering Heights: , volume I, London: Thomas Cautley Newby, , →OCLC, page 187:

     He's left th' yate ut t' full swing, and miss's pony has trodden dahn two rigs uh corn, un plottered through, raight o'er intuh t' meadow!

   • 1922 February, James Joyce, “[Episode 18: Penelope]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, , →OCLC, part III [Nostos], page 703:

     [O]f course he prefers plottering about the house [...]

   • 1932, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song (A Scots Quair), Polygon, published 2006, page 21:

     So one night after they had all had supper in the kitchen and old Sinclair had gone pleitering out to the byres, old Mistress Sinclair had up and nodded to Kirsty […].

   • 1986, Michael Innes, Appleby & Ospreys:

     There's certainly a small boat that people plouter about in.

plouter (plural plouters)

1. (Scotland, Ireland, Northern England, dialect) The act of ploutering, or splashing about.

• Poulter, poulter