Word.ws English Dictionary

rabat

/ɹəˈbæt//ɹəˈbɑːt/

rabat noun: a polishing material made of potter's clay that has failed in baking.

Noun

rabat (countable and uncountable, plural rabats)

  1. A polishing material made of potter's clay that has failed in baking.
  2. (countable) A piece of fabric fitted to the collar covering the shirt-front worn by Catholic and Anglican clergy.
  3. (countable) The clerical linen collar itself.

Verb

rabat (third-person singular simple present rabats, present participle rabatting, simple past and past participle rabatted)

  1. To rotate a plane of projection.
    • For example, we would tend to say that qa is rabatted (rotated) around the axis qd, but notice that conventional rabatment cannot explain the position of plane topl, since it should be rabatted around the line ix in the corporea, and instead it has been rotated around a vertical line passing...1996, James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective, →ISBN, page 112
    • Generally the true form of the diagonal is drawn on the half-breadth plan, being obtained by rabatting the plane containing the diagonal about the line through m into the horizontal plane.2009, John Harvard Biles, The Design and Construction of Ships, →ISBN

Proper noun (1) capitalized: Rabat

Rabat

  1. The capital city of Morocco, and capital city of the region of Rabat-Sale-Kenitra, Morocco.
  2. (metonymically) The Moroccan government.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Rabat

Rabat

  1. A town in the Western Region, Malta
  2. Former name of Victoria: a town and local council, the capital of the Gozo Region, Malta

Forms of rabat

Noun
pluralrabats
Verb
third-person singular presentrabats
present participlerabatting
past participlerabatted
pastrabatted

Origin of rabat

Borrowed from French rabat.

Apparently from French rabattre (“to lower”), which often denotes a folding or swinging motion downwards.

Borrowed from Arabic الرَّبَاط (ar-rabāṭ).

Words formed from rabat

Words that rhyme with rabat

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about rabat

What does rabat mean?
Rabat means a polishing material made of potter's clay that has failed in baking.
What part of speech is rabat?
Rabat can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce rabat?
Rabat is pronounced /ɹəˈbæt/.
What is the plural of rabat?
The plural of rabat is rabats.

Words near rabat in the dictionary

  1. Rabans
  2. rabaska
  3. rabaskas
  4. Rabassa
  5. Rabassas
  6. rabat
  7. Rabat-Sale-Kenitra
  8. Rabat-Salé-Kenitra
  9. Rabat-Salé-Kénitra
  10. rabate
  11. rabated

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rabat (page history and authors); Rabat (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-rabat.wav.

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