Word.ws English Dictionary

reddleman

reddleman noun: a ruddleman.

Noun

reddleman (plural reddlemen)

  1. A ruddleman.
    • You little children think there's only one cuckoo, one fox, one giant, one devil, and one reddleman, when there's lots of us all.1878, Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
  2. (archaic) A bogeyman
    • A child’s first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in his life. That blood-coloured figure was a sublimation of all the horrible dreams which had afflicted the juvenile spirit since imagination began. ‘The reddleman is coming for you!’ had been the formulated threat of Wessex mothers for many...1878, Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, page 89

Forms of reddleman

pluralreddlemen

Origin of reddleman

From reddle + -man.

Questions about reddleman

What does reddleman mean?
Reddleman means a ruddleman.
What part of speech is reddleman?
Reddleman is a noun.
What is the plural of reddleman?
The plural of reddleman is reddlemen.

Words near reddleman in the dictionary

  1. Redditts
  2. Reddix
  3. Reddixes
  4. reddle
  5. reddled
  6. reddleman
  7. reddlemen
  8. reddles
  9. reddling
  10. Reddock
  11. redds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reddleman (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: “reddleman.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/reddleman. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.