Patten

/ˈpat(ə)n/ · noun

Meaning

Any of various types of footwear with thick soles, often used to elevate the foot, especially wooden clogs..

Definitions by Sense

1. Any of various types of footwear with thick soles, often used to elevate the foot, especially wooden clogs.
2. (now historical) One of various wooden attachments used to lift a shoe above wet or muddy ground.
3. (obsolete) A circular wooden plank attached to a horse's foot to prevent it from sinking into a bog while plowing.
4. (now British dialectal) An ice skate.
5. (historical) An iron hoop attached to a person's boot in cases of hip-joint disease.
6. The base of a pillar.
7. (intransitive) To go about wearing pattens.
8. Obsolete form of paten.

Example Sentences

I went and told part of the excise money till twelve o’clock, and then called on my wife and took her to Mr. Pierces, she in the way being exceedingly troubled with a pair of new pattens, and I vexed to go so slow, it being late.

Tom Freckle, the smith's son, was the next victim to her rage. He was an ingenious workman, and made excellent pattens; nay, the very patten with which he was knocked down was his own workmanship.

"I fear there is a chase; I think I hear three or four galloping together; I am sure I hear more horses than one." / "Pooh, pooh, it is the wench of the house that is clattering to the well in her pattens; [...]."

Nobody had appeared belonging to the house except a person in pattens, who had been poking at the child from below with a broom; I don't know with what object, and I don't think she did.

They presented the most extraordinary and comic aspect imaginable, with their shaven heads and long beard; (the heads of all Mussulmen are shaved quite bare, with the exception of a tuft on the very top, which is left for the angel of the tomb on the day of judgment, say they, to grasp and carry them up to heaven by;) besides these, other objects are seen wrapped up in towels, with black grisled beards tickling their breasts, and tottering along on a high pair of pattens or rather stilts, at the imminent danger, as it appears, of breaking their necks.

Mrs. Peerybingle, going out into the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard—Mrs. Peerybingle filled the kettle at the water-butt.

The doors are many-belled: and crowds of dirty children form endless groups about the steps: or around the shell-fish dealers’ trays in these courts; whereof the damp pavements resound with pattens, and are drabbled with a never-failing mud.

I suppose that those who ramble beyond railways may yet come upon females underpinned with the useful and once indispensable pattens, but for a long time it has not been my lot to look upon a pair. Goloshes, clogs, cork-soles, and other inventions, have quite superseded the noisy old resource ; and I am not sure that the modern appliances could make out a perfect claim to superiority over the old, for the pattens not only kept the feet dry, they also, by raising the wearer from one to two inches, kept the garments out of the mire.

Synonyms for patten

Antonyms for patten

Related Words

Word Forms

• pattens
• pattening
• pattened

Usage Notes

Choose a synonym only when it preserves the intended meaning, tone, and grammar of the full sentence.

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