Word.ws English Dictionary

betwattle

betwattle verb: to surprise, to confound, to befuddle, to put in a distressed state of mind.

Verb

betwattle (third-person singular simple present betwattles, present participle betwattling, simple past and past participle betwattled)

  1. (West-Country, archaic, transitive) To surprise, to confound, to befuddle, to put in a distressed state of mind.
    • She would not let a man betwattle her with kisses... again.1996, Jo Ann Ferguson, Miss Charity's Case (Zebra Regency Romance), →ISBN
    • "No, you have tried to betwattle me by making the facts fit your assumption of who killed you and why."2007, Jocelyn Kelley, Lost in Shadow
  2. (West-Country, archaic, intransitive) To be in a distressed state of mind.

Forms of betwattle

third-person singular presentbetwattles
present participlebetwattling
past participlebetwattled
pastbetwattled
alternative formbetwaddle

Origin of betwattle

Possibly a back formation from betwattled, late 18th-century Dorset British slang for confused, bewildered.

Questions about betwattle

What does betwattle mean?
Betwattle means to surprise, to confound, to befuddle, to put in a distressed state of mind.
What part of speech is betwattle?
Betwattle is a verb.
What is the past tense of betwattle?
The past tense of betwattle is betwattled.

Words near betwattle in the dictionary

  1. betw.
  2. betwaddle
  3. betwaddled
  4. betwaddles
  5. betwaddling
  6. betwattle
  7. betwattled
  8. betwattles
  9. betwattling
  10. between
  11. between a rock and a hard place

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: betwattle (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.

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