Word.ws English Dictionary

bristlers

bristlers is the plural of bristler.

Meaning of bristler

Noun

bristler (plural bristlers)

  1. Someone or something that bristles.
    • but study this useful little insect, and we find that by care and attention we may not only manage to approach the little bristler, without fear of its weapon, but extract so many sweets, that when we know its service, we wonder how any one on earth can be so silly as to quarrel with it!1866, Charles Bullock, Our Own Fireside, page 25
  2. (informal) A bristled pig.
    • 'Twas he who rear'd the roe-deer's brood, And the young bristler of the wood ;1840, James Hogg, The Poetical Works of the Ettrick Shepherd
  3. (obsolete) A conman.
    • A friend of mine having occasion to show this section to a party of 4 bristlers, states that they withdrew a pace and seemed to be computing among themselves.1902, George O. Shields, Recreation - Volume 16, page 212
  4. (derogatory, obsolete) A person of low social class.
    • But I own I like a quiet unobtrusive bristler — the sort of man who doesn't want to take you beyond ten times ten in the multiplication table.1915, Eliakim Littell, Robert S. Littell, The Living Age - Volume 287, page 681
  5. (obsolete, slang) A soldier who is part of a company that carries pikes.
    • Amont the thirty thousand men led to war by Charles VIII., six thousand Swiss soldiers were especially remarked, formed in large square battalions, of one thousand men each, which were called "bristlers," in allusion to the pikes which they presented on all sides.1843, George Moir Bussey, Thomas Gaspey, The pictorial history of France and of the French people, page 71

Noun capitalized: Bristlers

Bristlers pl (plural only)

  1. (derogatory, historical, plural, plural-only, slang) A group of German refugees with Marxist leanings in 1849 who scattered to Switzerland, France and England.
    • The manufacturers agreed not to maintain any relations with the Bristlers' Trade Union, and they also agreed to introduce piecework wages where such wages did not exist, and to reduce the scale of piece-work where they did exist.1965, James Mavor, An economic history of Russia - Volume 2, page 431
    • In the spring of 1851, then, the "lowest of the low" invented the "Bristlers", whom Vogt pilfered from his Field Marshal in the autumn of 1859.1981, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: collected works, page 39

Origin of bristlers

A calque of German Bürstenheimer, coined by Abt (secretary to the Bishop of Freiburg) and applied to the Workers' Educational Association in Geneva.

Questions about bristlers

What does bristlers mean?
Bristlers means a group of German refugees with Marxist leanings in 1849 who scattered to Switzerland, France and England.
What is bristlers the plural of?
Bristlers is the plural of bristler.
What part of speech is bristlers?
Bristlers is a noun.

Words near bristlers in the dictionary

  1. bristleless
  2. bristlelike
  3. bristlemouth
  4. bristlemouths
  5. bristler
  6. bristlers
  7. bristles
  8. bristles up
  9. bristlet
  10. bristletail
  11. bristletails

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bristlers (page history and authors); Bristlers (page history and authors); bristler (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-Bristlers.ogg.

Cite this entry: “bristlers.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bristlers. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.