bagatelle
/ˌbæɡəˈtɛl/
bagatelle noun: a trifle; an insubstantial thing.
Noun
bagatelle (countable and uncountable, plural bagatelles)
- A trifle; an insubstantial thing.
- Sir C. Oh! dear madam, don't ask me, it's a very foolish song—a mere bagatelle.
Char. Oh! Sir Callaghan, I will admit of no excuse.1782, Charles Macklin, Love a-la-Mode, page 21 - […] the jails were larger and fuller, the number of murders was incomparably greater, the thefts and swindlings in the old country were a bagatelle to the large depredations there […]1850, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 68, page 226
- Synonyms:
- bag of shells, bric-a-brac, dicky, dicky-bird, fico, fig, flamfew, flyspeck, minuity, niff-naff
- Sir C. Oh! dear madam, don't ask me, it's a very foolish song—a mere bagatelle.
- A short piece of literature or of instrumental music, typically light or playful in character.
- One afternoon in 1920. a young pianist sat down in a shuttered room in the capital of defeated Germany and played a Bagatelle by Beethoven.2007, Norman Lebrecht, The Life And Death of Classical Music, page 7
- A game similar to billiards played on an oblong table with pockets or arches at one end only.
- For some time they did nothing save box, but at last they went down to the bagatelle room, and played bagatelle for a bit. They marked this advance in civilization by prodding holes in the ceiling with the bagatelle cues, which gave the ceiling the appearance of a cloth target after a Gatling gun...1895, Hugh Legge, “The Repton Club”, in John Matthew Knapp, editor, The Universities and the Social Problem, page 139
- Any of several smaller wooden tabletop games developed from the original bagatelle in which the pockets are made of pins.
- Synonyms:
- pin bagatelle, hit-a-pin bagatelle, jaw ball
Verb
bagatelle (third-person singular simple present bagatelles, present participle bagatelling, simple past and past participle bagatelled)
- To meander or move around, in a manner similar to the ball in the game of bagatelle.
- Admittedly Mané’s strike did rebound off a post as the ball bagatelled around the home area. It was characteristically cleared before Roberto Firmino could redirect the fall out beyond Henderson.2019 September 28, Louise Taylor, “Henderson howler hands Liverpool narrow win at spirited Sheffield United”, in The Guardian
- To bagatellize; to regard as a bagatelle.
- That Saddam Hussein announced his intentions to destroy Israel a long time ago was either ignored or bagatelled. “We just didn't have time to address the threat to Israel,” explained Brigitte Erler on the eve of a large peace demonstration in Bonn.2004, Henryk Boder, translated by Broder Translators' Collective, edited by Sander L. Gilman and Lilian M. Friedberg, A Jew in the New Germany, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 64
bagatelle meaning in Tamil and Bengali
bagatelle in Tamil
- அற்பம், பிசாத்து
bagatelle in Bengali
- তুচ্ছ বস্তু, অল্প গুরুত্বের বিষয়, বিলিয়ার্ডস খেলা
Examples of bagatelle in a sentence
- They'd purchased a little house in the eighth arrondissement in Paris that for them was just a bagatelle, since they rarely lived there.1996, Edmund White, “The tea ceremony”, in Ploughshares, volume 22, number 1, page 190:
- For some time they did nothing save box, but at last they went down to the bagatelle room, and played bagatelle for a bit.1895, Hugh Legge, “The Repton Club”, in John Matthew Knapp, editor, The Universities and the Social Problem, page 139:
Synonyms of bagatelle
13 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of bagatelle
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | bagatelles |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | bagatelles |
| present participle | bagatelling |
| past participle | bagatelled |
| past | bagatelled |
Origin of bagatelle
Borrowed from French bagatelle, from Italian bagattella.
Words formed from bagatelle
Phrases with bagatelle
Questions about bagatelle
- What does bagatelle mean?
- Bagatelle means a trifle; an insubstantial thing.
- What is bagatelle in Tamil?
- Bagatelle in Tamil is அற்பம், பிசாத்து. See Bagatelle meaning in Tamil.
- How do you use bagatelle in a sentence?
- They'd purchased a little house in the eighth arrondissement in Paris that for them was just a bagatelle, since they rarely lived there.
- What part of speech is bagatelle?
- Bagatelle can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce bagatelle?
- Bagatelle is pronounced /ˌbæɡəˈtɛl/.
- What is the plural of bagatelle?
- The plural of bagatelle is bagatelles.
Words near bagatelle in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bagatelle (page history and authors); bagatelle (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); bagatelle (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-bagatelle.wav.
Cite this entry: “bagatelle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bagatelle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.