# bagatelle
## English
### Etymology

Borrowed from French bagatelle, from Italian bagattella.

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /ˌbæɡəˈtɛl/
* Audio (Southern England):(file)

### Noun

bagatelle (countable and uncountable, plural bagatelles)
* 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.
* (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.
* (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.
* (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

* bagatellize
* Russian bagatelle

#### See also

* carom
* pachinko
* pinball

### Verb

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

* “bagatelle”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
* “bagatelle”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
* “bagatelle”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.

## French
### Etymology

Borrowed from Italian bagattella.

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /ba.ɡa.tɛl/
* Audio:(file)

### Noun

bagatelle f (plural bagatelles)
* bagatelle, trinket, bauble
* (food) trifle

#### Descendants

* → Catalan: bagatel·la
* → Danish: bagatel
* → Dutch: bagatel
* → English: bagatelle
* → German: Bagatelle
* → Greek: μπαγκατέλα (bagkatéla)

### Further reading

* “bagatelle”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

## Italian
### Noun

bagatelle f
* plural of bagatella

### Anagrams

* gabellate