Word.ws English Dictionary

ruddleman

ruddleman noun: someone who deals in ruddle (red ochre), usually itinerant and red-stained.

Noun

ruddleman (plural ruddlemen)

  1. Someone who deals in ruddle (red ochre), usually itinerant and red-stained
    • And little Rutlandshire is tearmed Raddleman.1622, Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, song 23
    • The traveller with the cart was a reddleman - a person whose vocation was to supply farmers with redding for their sheep.1878, Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, page 9

Forms of ruddleman

pluralruddlemen
alternative formraddleman
alternative formreddleman

Origin of ruddleman

From ruddle + -man. First appears in print in 1622, possibly coined by Michael Drayton.

Questions about ruddleman

What does ruddleman mean?
Ruddleman means someone who deals in ruddle (red ochre), usually itinerant and red-stained.
What part of speech is ruddleman?
Ruddleman is a noun.
What is the plural of ruddleman?
The plural of ruddleman is ruddlemen.

Words near ruddleman in the dictionary

  1. ruddinesses
  2. rudding
  3. Ruddington
  4. ruddle
  5. ruddled
  6. ruddleman
  7. ruddlemen
  8. ruddles
  9. ruddling
  10. ruddock
  11. ruddocks

Source and license

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