battledore

Noun

battledore (plural battledores)

1. A game played with a shuttlecock and rackets (properly battledore and shuttlecock); a forerunner of badminton.
2. The racket used in this game.
   • Seven or eight of them, standing in a circle, were engaged in a game of shittlecock. They had in their hands no battledores. They did not employ the hand or arm, any way, in striking it. But, after taking a short race, and springing from the floor, they met the descending shittlecock with the sole...1797, George Staunton, “Cochin-china”, in An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China; […] In Two Volumes, […], volume I, London: […] G[eorge] Nicol...
   • There were nights when it seemed to me that our position could be stormed by twenty Boy Scouts armed with airguns, or twenty Girl Guides armed with battledores, for that matter.1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter III, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC
3. (obsolete) A child's hornbook for learning the alphabet.
   • You will also pardon the errors of the Work, for you know I was not bred to letters; but, that the battledore, at an age not exceeding six, was the last book I used at school.1802, William Hutton, The History of the Roman Wall, preface
4. (historical) A wooden paddle-shaped bat or beetle used to wash clothes by beating, stirring, or smoothing them.
   • There is a large basin near the fountain, where numbers of women may be seen every day, kneeling at the edge of the water, and beating the clothes with heavy pieces of wood in the shape of battledores.1563, John Foxe, chapter 21, in The Book of Martyrs
   • The laundry process of the time [1665] consisted of boiling textiles with lye or soap and then beating them with a battledore, a rustic version of a cricket bat.2018 October 25, Matthew Taub, “Why England Once Forced Everyone to Be Buried in Wool”, in Atlas Obscura