Word.ws English Dictionary

puttocks

puttocks is the plural of puttock.

Meaning of puttock

Noun

puttock (plural puttocks)

  1. (UK, regional) Any of several birds of prey including the red kite, buzzard and marsh harrier
    • Some like to hounds, some like to Apes, dismayd, / Some like to Puttockes, all in plumes arayd: / All shap't according their conditions […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto XI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. (broadly) A rapacious person who preys on the defenseless.
    • Besides that, as though this pillage and pollage were not rapacious enough, they take in and enclose commons, moors, heaths and other common pastures where out the poor commonalty were want to have all their provisions and feeding for their cattle and (which is more) corn for themselves to live...2014, Susan Doran, Norman Jones, The Elizabethan World, →ISBN, page 440
  3. The futtock.

Noun

puttocks pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) A small shroud which goes from the shroud of the mainmast, foremast, or mizenmast, to the topmast shrouds
    • S. Davy: They look like puttocks; these should be they.1611, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl
    • The topmast shrouds were set up with deadeyes and lanyards, of which the lower deadeye was either connected to an iron plate at the rim of the top, and by that means to the puttocks (for so what is now called the futtock rigging was named) or else directly to the puttocks (Smith, 1653).1912, Leonard George Carr Laughton, Roger Charles Anderson, William Gordon Perrin, The Mariner's Mirror - Volume 2, page 303

Questions about puttocks

What does puttocks mean?
Puttocks means a small shroud which goes from the shroud of the mainmast, foremast, or mizenmast, to the topmast shrouds.
What is puttocks the plural of?
Puttocks is the plural of puttock.
What part of speech is puttocks?
Puttocks is a noun.

Words near puttocks in the dictionary

  1. putting wood in t’hole
  2. putting words in someone's mouth
  3. puttings
  4. putto
  5. puttock
  6. puttocks
  7. puttoes
  8. puttogether
  9. puttony
  10. puttonyos
  11. puttonys

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: puttocks (page history and authors); puttock (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: “puttocks.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/puttocks. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.