bolter
verbEtymology From bolt + -er.
1
Dialectal To smear or become smeared with a grimy substance.
- Methinks I see them with their boltered hair, Staring and grinning in thy gentle face, And in their ruthless hands their daggers drawn,1592, anonymous author, Arden of Faversham:
- Now I see 'tis true, For the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me, And points at them for his.1606, William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth:
4 more examples
- A saddler refused to black the linen lining of a harness-collar, though he had been told to do so, because the colouring would "bolter" the horse.1903, The Academy and Literature - Volume 63, page 104:
- She dashed hither and thither, never happy, always itching to be on somewhere else, with her eyebrows plucked to parentheses and her lotion-filled eyes boltering, looking as somebody said, like a peripatetic puff-ball.1931, Owen Archer, Green Wine, page 113:
- “The had seen me boltered in the blood of enemies when I battled and bound five beasts, raided a troll-nest and in the night-sea slaughtered sea-brutes.”1999, Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page 15:
- Then escaping from the foemen, boltered with the blood you shed, you, defiant, fearing no men, saved your honor and your head!.2001, Gayden Wren, A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan:
2
To sift or filter through a sieve or bolter.
- A thousand times the day, our Sieve is crowned; A thousand times 'tis drained: Let the Sieve once he strained, And, grain by grain, around Ye shall behold the ground Covered with folk, cast from the boltering Sieve.1888, John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: It̲alian literature, page 392:
- Owing to the scarcity of food the old problem has latterly cropped up again whether, instead of baking white-bread, it would not be more practical to make bread of unboltered meal, since through the process of boltering the grain loses 20-30% of its nutritive value, according to the degree of milling.1919, Afdeeling Natuurkunde, Proceedings of the Section of Sciences - Volume 21, page 49:
1 more example
- they were not themselves perhaps conscious how finely the foreign material must needs be boltered through a native sieve before it was palatable to English appetites, and, curiously as it may appear, for a couple of decades after the King's coming-in the hall-mark of your top-wit, your "high-brow" modern cant would name him, was not so much a Gallomania, as a particular veneration for "the greatest man of the last age, Ben Johnson."1964, Montague Summers, The playhouse of Pepys, page 277:
3
To fish using a bolter.
- Those who are not boltering or spillering in the spring are crabbing.1915, British Sea Anglers' Society, Quarterly - Issues 31-45, page 77:
- Yes, as a place of residence our little town should commend itself to the wealthy leisured classes; and as for us poor working folk, why, we manage to get along tolerable well, thank 'e, what with our crabbing, and spiltering, and boltering, and trammelling, and teeling our little plats of land, and snaring a few rabbits now and again, and — this in your ear — maybe knocking over a pheasant or two at a particular time.1942, Charles Lee, Cornish Tales, page 110:
4
To pound rapidly.
- In Elliotson v. Feetham, 2 Bingham's N.C., 134, in 1835, the plaintiff a physician resideing in the parish of St. George, Hanover Square, in the county of Middlesex, and possessed of a house for a term of years, sued the defendant in case for a nuisance in carrying on an iron-mongery factory, "making divers large fires, and also divers loud, heavy, jarring, varying, agitating, hammering, and boltering sounds and noises.”1852, The Western Law Journal - Volume 9, page 446:
- The author refers the case of a teenager, eighteen years old, suffering from stuttering and boltering along with symptoms of anxiety, shakings and sweats.1978, Rivista internazionale di psicologia e ipnosi - Volumes 19-20, page 200:
1 more example
- I could put all that adolescent, everything-rides-on-this-putt crap behind me. Yet when I lay awake at night contemplating the months ahead, my heart would bolter and my breathing quicken.2000, John Paul Newport, The Fine Green Line:
5
Of a whale To swim or turn sideways while eating.
- Close observers of the habits of whales in more recent times however do not record this practice and it must be regarded as a fanciful belief which probably arose as Gunther (1949) suggests as a fisherman's explanation of the patches and their frequent association with boltering whales.1929, Discovery Reports - Volume 32, page 215:
- Concerning with feeding habits of baleen whales, it has been also known that they follow to two different ways to collect the food organisms, say, “skimming” and “swallowing ” or “gulping ” by boltering the body while feeding,1974, The Scientific Reports of the Whales Research Institute:
1 more example
- May be seen "breaching," propelling the body about halfway out of the water, then falling back with a huge splash; "Skyhopping," rising vertically out of the water apparently to visually scan the area; and "boltering," lying on its side while waving a pectoral fin in the air.1991, Ocean Studies Institute, Santa Catalina Island USC Marine Science Center Field Trip, page 10:
6
Aeronautics, Aerospace, Aviation, Business, Engineering, Government, Military, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Politics, War To miss a landing on an aircraft carrier by failing to catch the arresting gear wires with the aircraft's tailhook.
- Commander Kleemann came back and boltered again on his second attempt. lt is unheard of for him to bolter twice in a row. Then on his third attempt he got aboard with an OK three-wire trap.1982, Bert Kinzey, F-14 A & B Tomcat: in detail & scale, page 46:
- In the Diamondback's ready room, a tailhook bolt hangs by a string from the ceiling over one pilot's seat; he was the last to "bolter" that day, meaning he missed the wires while landing and had to make another pass.1994, U.S. News & World Report - Volume 116, Issues 1-8, page 163:
2 more examples
- Tomcat 209 had one engine out, and if his tailhook failed to engage an arrestor wire, he wouldn't have the power necessary to complete a touch-and-go and would bolter off the forward end of the flight deck again.1994, Keith Douglass, Countdown, page 298:
- The majority had bet I'd come down on the 2 wire, or, worse yet, knowing I did not want to bolter, the 1 wire.2006, Air & Space Smithsonian, page 18:
- Antonyms
- trap