lickpot
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: lickpots
Etymology: From Middle English likpot; equivalent to lick + pot. Possibly from the act of using a finger to clean a pot after eating.
Senses: examples: text: Coordinate term: thumbkin
text: Fife-men and pipers braw, Merry deils, tak them a', Gown, lace, and livery — lickpot and ladle ; Jockey shall wear the hood, Jenny the sark of God — For codpiece and petticoat, dishclout and daidle.
ref: 1820, The Edinburgh Review - Volume 34, page 156:
text: Everyone said, "Oh," and held up the finger we call "lickpot," and nodded his head.
ref: 1955, Hans Christian Andersen, Six fairy tales by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen:
text: No, only little Peter Playman; dear Thumbkin, Lickpot, and Longman were grabbing hardness under the gray cloth, shaping the flat oblong of hardness.
ref: 1970, Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow, The weedkiller's daughter, page 356:
text: The use of the index finger to scoop the remaining juices from the cooking pot up to the lips gave it the finely appropriate name of 'the lickpot.'
ref: 2008, Peter C. D. Brears, Cooking and Dining in Medieval England, page 214:
synonyms: word: arrow-finger
word: demonstrator
word: first finger
word: forefinger
word: index
word: index finger
word: lickpot
word: pointer
word: pointer finger
word: pointling
word: showing finger
word: teacher
word: trigger finger
glosses: The forefinger.
examples: text: . And the message that came was by the mouth of a kind of jackal or lickpot of John Dick's — who, for reasons of his own, hated me, chiefly because I took no share in the foulness of him and his subservient crew.
ref: 1896, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, The Grey Man - Volume 1, page 114:
text: Maybe ye'll not have another chance before the gallows gets ye ! Off with ye now, for a dirty fingered, lickpot sneak, or I'll break the fiddle over the shoulders of ye!"
ref: 1911, Maurice Hewlett, The Song of Renny, page 215:
text: Piso is a peasant, Cyrus a cowherd, Brutus and Cassius landsurveyors, Demosthenes a vine-dresser, Fabius a threader of beads, Artaxerxes a ropemaker, Æneas a miller, Achilles a scurvy pate, Agamemnon a lickpot, Ulysses a haymower, Nestor a beggar, Ancus Martius a shiptrimmer. . . .
ref: 1929, Anatole France, Rabelais, page 98:
text: And, being no lickpot, would be left to watch the breakfast-porridge while the Sisters and Catechists went to Mass with the pupils of the school, on the benches of which young Boengabadu maintained isolated pre-eminence as a genuine Aboriginal converted from utterest heathenry, by the efforts of Pere St. Xavier and Pere Amable-Marie.
ref: 1932, Richard Dehan, Dead Pearls: A Novel of the Great Wide West, page 195:
synonyms: word: lickspittle
word: sycophant
word: toady
word: adulator
word: apple polisher
word: arse-kisser
word: arse-licker
word: ass-kisser
word: ass-licker
word: bootlicker
word: buttkisser
word: buttlicker
word: brown noser
word: clawback
word: dickrider
word: doormat
word: flatterer
word: flunkey
word: groveler
word: groveller
word: hanger-on
word: kiss-ass
word: lackey
word: lickspittle
word: lick-platter
word: lickpot
word: minion
word: people pleaser
word: pickthank
word: schmoozer
word: simp
word: suck up
word: sycophant
word: throne sniffer
word: toadeater
word: toady
word: white knight
glosses: An untrustworthy sycophant.