petling
petling noun: term of affection or endearment; darling.
Noun
petling (plural petlings)
- term of affection or endearment; darling.
- If thou return not, Gammer o'er her pail
Will sing in sorrow, 'neath the brinded cow,
And Gaffer sigh over his nut-brown ale; […]
While evermore the petlings, with sad brow,
Will look for thee upon the holly bough […]1845, Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides, Book the Fourth, Stanza IX - The cause of his summary dethronement was, that Ma Betty, meaning it in affection, had called him her “heavenly petling." Jofiie objected, on the ground that, whatever she meant, “ heavenly petling” was in Monkeyish a term of insult.1898 February, Mary J.H. Skrine, “How Clytemnestra Saved a Kingdom”, in Temple Bar:A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers, volume 113
- If thou return not, Gammer o'er her pail
Forms of petling
| plural | petlings |
|---|
Origin of petling
From pet + -ling.
Questions about petling
- What does petling mean?
- Petling means term of affection or endearment; darling.
- What part of speech is petling?
- Petling is a noun.
- What is the plural of petling?
- The plural of petling is petlings.
Words near petling in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: petling (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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Cite this entry: “petling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/petling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.