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dottle (DOT-l) - n., the plug of half-burnt tobacco and ashes left in the bottom of a pipe after smoking.
Roughly equivalent to the butt of a cigarette. Cleaning out the cake of dottle is part of the rituals of pipe-smoking, the whole of which are part of the appeal of smoking one in the first place. First attested in this sense in the early 1820s, a metaphoric extension of Middle English dottel or dottle, a lump or mass, originally dottel, the plug of the tap of a barrel, a diminutive of dot in the dialect sense of a lump.
---L.
Roughly equivalent to the butt of a cigarette. Cleaning out the cake of dottle is part of the rituals of pipe-smoking, the whole of which are part of the appeal of smoking one in the first place. First attested in this sense in the early 1820s, a metaphoric extension of Middle English dottel or dottle, a lump or mass, originally dottel, the plug of the tap of a barrel, a diminutive of dot in the dialect sense of a lump.
---L.
