Definitions

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

  • intransitive verb To fidget.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To shake; jolt; shake in order to separate, as beans from peas after they are threshed together.
  • To drive (cattle).
  • To shake; move by sudden jerks or starts.
  • To limp.
  • To be restless.

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

  • verb Scotland To move irregularly up and down.
  • verb Scotland To swarm (with).

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, perhaps from Old French hocher, to shake, possibly of Germanic origin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Anglo-Norman hocher, Middle French hocher, from a Germanic source (compare Dutch hutsen, German hotzen).

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word hotch.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • "Ye can always see more stars when you're in the country, especially if there's a nip of frost in the air, and these night the sky was just hotching with stars."

    - Alasdair Gray, Lanark, ch. 17

    January 19, 2009

  • "At certain times of the year, particularly after the rainy season, they velvet mites'>velvet mites proliferated, and the grass around our house hotched with them."

    - William Boyd, Memories of the Sausage Fly (collected in Bamboo).

    Reading that Lanark citation from two years ago makes me want to go back and read it again.

    April 26, 2011

  • The novel that is, not just the citation.

    April 26, 2011