Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A nicety or subtlety; a quibble.
  • noun A furrow.
  • noun A croft, or small separate piece of ground.

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

  • noun Subtilty; nicety; quibble.

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

  • noun A quibble, an evasive distinction.
  • noun A small plot of land; historically: a strip of land that together with others like it formed a larger field.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Shortened from quillity.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Origin unknown.

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Examples

  • Ready at all times for such emergencies, the leader would not suffer himself to be found without every conceivable legal quillet, sharpened and retouched, against the official orders.

    Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 Various

  • There is not a quip nor a quillet from the slangy pen of the daily newspaper writers that she does not brood over and worry about as heartily as if it were an overdue mortgage on her pianoforte.

    Eugene Field A Study In Heredity And Contradictions Thompson, Slason 1901

  • So far as my imperfect hearing can ascertain, he has been instructing the jury that they may utterly dismiss from their minds my highly ingenious plea of inability to offer any other kind of matrimony than a polygamous union -- surely, a very, very slipshod off-hand method of disposing of such a nice sharp quillet of the Law! ...

    Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. F. Anstey 1895

  • {350} into the quillet that _his_ thunderbolt had stopped the chariot of the Sun and knocked the Greenwich Phaeton off the box, is the same which betrayed him into yet grander error -- which deserves the full word,

    A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) Augustus De Morgan 1838

  • "for the little cot-house to which it belongs, together with the little quillet in which it stands, being several years since mortgaged for ten pounds, the fruit of this tree alone, in a course of some years, freed the house and garden, and its more valuable self, from that burden."

    On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, with Biographical Notices of Them, 2nd edition, with considerable additions Samuel Felton

Comments

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  • 1. A small plot of land.

    2. An oral quibble.

    (Wiktionary)

    July 6, 2008