Meaning

(also figuratively) A small enclosure or field of grassland, especially one used to exercise or graze horses or other animals..

Definitions by Sense

1. (also figuratively) A small enclosure or field of grassland, especially one used to exercise or graze horses or other animals.
2. An enclosure next to a racecourse where horses are paraded and mounted before a race and unsaddled after a race.
3. An area at a racing circuit where the racing vehicles are parked and worked on before and between races.
4. A field on which a game is played; a playing field.
5. A field of grassland of any size, either enclosed by fences or delimited by geographical boundaries, especially a large area for keeping cattle or sheep.
6. A place in a superficial deposit where ore or washdirt (“earth rich enough in metal to pay for washing”) is excavated; also, a place for storing ore, washdirt, etc.
7. (often passive voice) To place or keep (cattle, horses, sheep, or other animals) within a paddock (noun sense 1 or 2.4); hence, to provide (such animals) with pasture.
8. To enclose or fence in (land) to form a paddock.

Example Sentences

Upon this information, they instantly passed through the hall once more, and ran across the lawn after their father, who was deliberately pursuing his way towards a small wood on one side of the paddock.

A jargonell pear tree at one end of the cottage, a rivulet, and flower-plot of a rood in extent, in front, and a kitchen-garden behind; a paddock for a cow, and a small field, cultivated with several crops of grain rather for the benefit of the cottager than for sale, announced the warm and cordial comforts which Old England, even at her most northern extremity, extends to her meanest inhabitants.

[H]e has delineated estates of romance, from which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks.

They were not members of a country where literature is confined to its little paddock, without influence on the larger field (part lawn, part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in sympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists.

There was only the extent of a wide paddock and a lawn between the hall-door and that grand old gateway, and the house, though substantial and capacious, hardly pretended to the dignity of a mansion.

The Queen of Hearts was floodlit behind the petrol pumps: a Tudor barn converted, a vestige of a farmyard left in the arrangement of the restaurant and bars: a swimming pool where the paddock had been.

[T]he two of them [Benjamin the donkey and Boxer the cart-horse] usually spent their Sundays together in the small paddock beyond the orchard, grazing side by side and never speaking.

Word Forms

• paddocks
• paddocking
• paddocked
• padock
• puddock

Synonyms for paddock

Related Words

When Should You Use Paddock?

Use paddock when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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