Wiktionary

bagatelle

See also: Bagatelle

English

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Etymology

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Borrowed from French bagatelle, from Italian bagattella.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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bagatelle (countable and uncountable, plural bagatelles)

  1. A trifle; an insubstantial thing.
    Synonyms: bag of shells; see also Thesaurus:trifle
    • 1782, Charles Macklin, Love a-la-Mode, page 21:
      Sir C. Oh! dear madam, don't ask me, it's a very foolish song—a mere bagatelle.
      Char. Oh! Sir Callaghan, I will admit of no excuse.
    • 1850, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 68, page 226:
      […] the jails were larger and fuller, the number of murders was incomparably greater, the thefts and swindlings in the old country were a bagatelle to the large depredations there […]
    • 1879 September 6, “Railway Projects”, in Railway World, 5 (36): 853:
      The repayment of the cost of the western part of the road, whatever it might be, would be a mere bagatelle, for the older provinces would have been enriched by the stimulus given to business by the opening up of the plains, […]
    • 1996, Edmund White, “The tea ceremony”, in Ploughshares, volume 22, number 1, page 190:
      They'd purchased a little house in the eighth arrondissement in Paris that for them was just a bagatelle, since they rarely lived there.
  2. (literature, music) A short piece of literature or of instrumental music, typically light or playful in character.
    • 2007, Norman Lebrecht, The Life And Death of Classical Music, page 7:
      One afternoon in 1920. a young pianist sat down in a shuttered room in the capital of defeated Germany and played a Bagatelle by Beethoven.
  3. (uncountable) A game similar to billiards played on an oblong table with pockets or arches at one end only.
    • 1895, Hugh Legge, “The Repton Club”, in John Matthew Knapp, editor, The Universities and the Social Problem, page 139:
      For some time they did nothing save box, but at last they went down to the bagatelle room, and played bagatelle for a bit. They marked this advance in civilization by prodding holes in the ceiling with the bagatelle cues, which gave the ceiling the appearance of a cloth target after a Gatling gun had been shooting at it.
  4. (uncountable) Any of several smaller wooden tabletop games developed from the original bagatelle in which the pockets are made of pins.
    Synonyms: pin bagatelle, hit-a-pin bagatelle, jaw ball

Derived terms

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Translations

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See also

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Verb

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bagatelle (third-person singular simple present bagatelles, present participle bagatelling, simple past and past participle bagatelled)

  1. (intransitive, rare) To meander or move around, in a manner similar to the ball in the game of bagatelle.
    • 2019 September 28, Louise Taylor, “Henderson howler hands Liverpool narrow win at spirited Sheffield United”, in The Guardian‎[1]:
      Admittedly Mané’s strike did rebound off a post as the ball bagatelled around the home area. It was characteristically cleared before Roberto Firmino could redirect the fall out beyond Henderson.
  2. (transitive, rare) To bagatellize; to regard as a bagatelle.
    • 2004, Henryk Boder, translated by Broder Translators' Collective, edited by Sander L. Gilman and Lilian M. Friedberg, A Jew in the New Germany, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 64:
      That Saddam Hussein announced his intentions to destroy Israel a long time ago was either ignored or bagatelled. “We just didn't have time to address the threat to Israel,” explained Brigitte Erler on the eve of a large peace demonstration in Bonn.

Further reading

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French

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Etymology

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Borrowed from Italian bagattella.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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bagatelle f (plural bagatelles)

  1. bagatelle, trinket, bauble
  2. (food) trifle

Descendants

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Further reading

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Italian

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Noun

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bagatelle f

  1. plural of bagatella

Anagrams

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