Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A British military officer's orderly.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A Turkish weight varying in amount in different localities.
  • noun A person allowed by the government to every company of a regiment on foreign service.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A man who has charge of a bathorse and his load.
  • noun A weight used in the East, varying according to the locality; in Turkey, the greater batman is about 157 pounds, the lesser only a fourth of this; at Aleppo and Smyrna, the batman is 17 pounds.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A unit of weight used in the East.
  • noun military A servant or valet to an army officer.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an orderly assigned to serve a British military officer

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Obsolete bat, packsaddle (from French bât, from Old French bast, from Late Latin bastum) + man.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Turkish batman.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

bat (“packsaddle”) +‎ man. The element bat is from French bât, from Old French bast.

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Examples

Comments

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  • "There was a daughter called Joan but she turned out badly too, started a child and went away, God knows where, and now he had no one to look after him but an old soldier called Faxy, a tall, stringy, ravaged-looking man, toothless and half mad Faxy had attached himself to Tom years before as a batman."

    - Frank O'Connor, 'The Miser'.

    September 6, 2008

  • The name of a town in Turkey.

    August 21, 2009

  • A very litigious town.

    August 21, 2009

  • "Banks will not advance money", in the shorthand code used by railroad telegraphers. --US Railway Association, Standard Cipher Code, 1906. See bathtub.

    January 20, 2013

  • "Alfred Thaddeus Crane Pennyworth is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics, most commonly in association with the superhero Batman.

    "Pennyworth is depicted as Bruce Wayne's loyal and tireless butler, housekeeper, legal guardian, best friend, aide-de-camp, and surrogate father figure following the murders of Thomas and Martha Wayne. As a classically trained British actor and an ex-Special Operations Executive operative of honor and ethics with connections within the intelligence community, he has been called "Batman's batman"."

    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alfred_Pennyworth&oldid=854935165

    August 16, 2018