cobbler
Meanings
Plural: cobblers
Noun
- a person who makes or repairs shoes
- tall sweetened iced drink of wine or liquor with fruit
- a pie made of fruit with rich biscuit dough usually only on top of the fruit
- A person who repairs, and sometimes makes, shoes.
- A sheep left to the end to be sheared (for example, because its wool is filthy, or because it is difficult to catch).
- A person who cobbles (“to assemble or mend in an improvised or rough way”); a clumsy workman.
- An (iced) alcoholic drink containing spirit or wine, with lemon juice and sugar.
- A roadworker who lays cobbles.
- The shiny, hard seed of the horse chestnut tree (Aesculus hippocastanum), especially when used in the game of the same name (sense 1.2); a conker, a horse chestnut.
- Synonym of conkers (“a game for two players in which the participants each have a horse-chestnut (known as a cobbler (sense 1.1) or conker) suspended from a length of string, and take turns to strike their opponent's conker with their own with the object of destroying the opponent's conker before their own is destroyed”).
- Used as a name for various animals.
- Also estuary cobbler:
- The South Australian catfish (Cnidoglanis macrocephalus), a species of catfish native to Australia which has dorsal and pectoral fins bearing sharp, venomous spines.
- Used as a name for various animals.
- Also estuary cobbler:
- The soldier or South Australian cobbler (Gymnapistes marmoratus), a brown fish native to southern Australian estuaries which is not closely related to Cnidoglanis macrocephalus, but also has venemous spines on its dorsal and pectoral fins.
- Used as a name for various animals.
- Also river cobbler: basa (Pangasius bocourti), an edible species of shark catfish native to the Chao Phraya and Mekong river basins in Southeast Asia.
- Used as a name for various animals.
- Pangas catfish (Pangasius pangasius), an edible species of shark catfish native to Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, and Pakistan.
- Used as a name for various animals.
- Condica sutor, an owlet moth native to North America.
- A police officer.
- Often preceded by a descriptive word as in apple cobbler, peach cobbler, etc.: a kind of pie, usually filled with fruit, originally having a crust at the base but nowadays generally lacking this and instead topped with a thick, cake-like pastry layer.
- A testicle.
Origin / Etymology
Inherited from Middle English cobeler, cobelere (“mender of shoes, cobbler”) [and other forms]; further origin unknown. The word appears to be derived from an early form of cobble (“to mend roughly, patch; (specifically) to mend shoes, especially roughly”) + -er (suffix forming agent nouns), but is attested much earlier than the verb which suggests that the verb may be a back-formation from cobbler.
Sense 2 (“sheep left to the end to be sheared”) is a pun on cobbler’s last (“tool for shaping or preserving the shape of shoes”); while sense 3 (“clumsy workman”) is derived from cobble + -er: see above.
Synonyms
5-O, alphabet, barney, beatsman, bizzie, blue heeler, blue meanie, bluebottle, bluecoat, bobby, body snatcher, bogey, botcher, boy in blue, bull, bullyman, buttons, centenier, charpering omi, chazzer, chuckler, cobbler, conkers, cop, copper, cozzer, cracker, crowns, crusher, deep-dish pie, dibble, fed, filth, finest, finger, five-o, flatfoot, flatty, fuzz, garda, gendarme, glowie, guardian of the peace, harman, harman-beck, jack, jackboot, jake, John Law, John Q. Law, Johnny Hopper, lad of wax, lawman, mee-maw, monarch, Mr Plod, mutton shunter, nuthook, Officer Friendly, oinker, Old Bill, PC Plod, peeler, pig, piggy, plod, po-po, police, police officer, policeman, policeperson, polis, raw lobster, roller, rozzer, scufter, shoemaker, shoemender, slop, souter, statie, swine, twelve, tyre biter, unboiled lobster, walloper, waxie, waxy, wooden-top
Scrabble Score: 13
cobbler is a valid Scrabble (US) TWL wordcobbler is a valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
cobbler is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary