Definitions

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

  • noun A bundle of twigs, sticks, or branches bound together.
  • noun A bundle of pieces of iron or steel to be welded or hammered into bars.
  • transitive verb To bind into a fagot; bundle.
  • transitive verb To decorate with fagoting.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To ornament (a fabric) by drawing out a number of threads and tying together in the middle a series of the cross-threads. See fagoting.
  • noun A bundle of sticks, twigs, or small branches of trees, used for fuel or for other purposes, as in fortifications; a fascine; as a definite amount of wood, a bundle 3 feet long and 24 inches round. See cut under fascine.
  • noun The punishment of burning alive, as for heresy; the stake: from the use of fagots of wood in making the fire.
  • noun A bundle of pieces of iron or steel, ready to be welded and drawn out into bars; as a definite amount of such metal, 120 pounds avoirdupois.
  • noun A person formerly hired to take the place of another at the muster of a military company, or to hide deficiency in its number when it was not full.
  • noun A badge worn in medieval times by those who had recanted their heretical opinions. It was designed to show what they had merited but narrowly escaped.
  • noun A heap of fishes piled up for the night on the drying-flakes; a bundle of fish, about 100, taken from the flakes and put under shelter at night.
  • To tie together; bind in a fagot or bundle; collect and bind together.
  • Specifically In metallurgy, to cut (bars of metal, usually of iron or steel) into pieces of suitable length, which are then made up into “fagots,” “piles,” or bundles, and, after reheating, welded together, and rolled or drawn out under the hammer into bars.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A bundle of sticks, twigs, or small branches of trees, used for fuel, for raising batteries, filling ditches, or other purposes in fortification; a fascine.
  • noun A bundle of pieces of wrought iron to be worked over into bars or other shapes by rolling or hammering at a welding heat; a pile.
  • noun (Mus.) A bassoon. See Fagotto.
  • noun engraving A person hired to take the place of another at the muster of a company.
  • noun Slang, Eng. An old shriveled woman.
  • noun iron, in bars or masses, manufactured from fagots.
  • noun [Political cant, Eng.] the vote of a person who has been constituted a voter by being made a landholder, for party purposes.
  • transitive verb To make a fagot of; to bind together in a fagot or bundle; also, to collect promiscuously.

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

  • noun A bundle of sticks, twigs or small tree branches bound together, usually with two bands or withes, while a bavin has only one.
  • noun slang A (male) homosexual.
  • noun NATO code name for the Soviet MiG-15 fighter aircraft.
  • verb transitive To make a fagot of; to bind together in a fagot or bundle.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun offensive term for an openly homosexual man
  • verb bind or tie up in or as if in a faggot
  • verb ornament or join (fabric) by faggot stitch
  • noun a bundle of sticks and branches bound together
  • verb fasten together rods of iron in order to heat or weld them

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, from Old French, from Old Provençal, possibly from Vulgar Latin *facus, from Greek phakelos, bundle.]

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Examples

Comments

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  • If that etymology holds up - Middle English, from Old French, from Old Provençal, possibly from Vulgar Latin *facus, from Greek phakelos, bundle - then that's the same root as fascist.

    November 15, 2018

  • See this, from the examples on fascio:

    The Italian name of the movement, fascismo, is derived from fascio, bundle, political group, but also refers to the movement's emblem, the fasces, a bundle of rods bound around a projecting axe-head that was carried before an ancient Roman magistrate by an attendant as a symbol of authority and power.

    November 15, 2018