clutter
A confused disordered jumble of things.
Noun
- A confused disordered jumble of things.
- He saw what a Clutter there was with Huge, Over-grown Pots, Pans, and Spits. - 1692, Roger L’Estrange, “ (please specify the fable number.) (please specify the name of the fable.)”, in Fables, of Æsop and Other Eminent...
- Earless ghost swift moths become “invisible” to echolocating bats by forming mating clusters close (less than half a meter) above vegetation and effectively blending into the clutter of echoes that the bat receives from...
- Background echoes, from clouds etc., on a radar or sonar screen.
- Alternative form of clowder (“collective noun for cats”).
- Organizing ghost stories is like herding a clutter of cats: the phenomenon resists organization and classification. - 2008, John Robert Colombo, The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories, Introduction:
- Clatter; confused noise.
- October 14 1718, John Arbuthnot, letter to Jonathan Swift I hardly heard a word of news or politicks, except a little clutter about sending some impertinent presidents du parliament to prison
- It was then you might have heard a clutter: pots, pans and pitchers, mugs, jugs and jordens, all put themselves in motion at once[…] - 1835, William Cobbett, John Morgan Cobbett, James Paul Cobbett, Selections from...
- A Sperner family.
Origin
From Middle English cloteren (“to form clots; coagulate; heap on”), from clot (“clot”), equivalent to clot + -er (frequentative suffix). Compare Welsh cludair (“heap, pile”), cludeirio (“to heap”).
Forms
Derived
anticlutter bioclutter cluttercore clutterfree clutter-free clutterless clutterous cluttersome cluttery cyberclutter declutter e-clutter surface clutter unclutter volume clutter
Verb
- To fill something with clutter.
- That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters. - 2013 May 25, “No hiding place”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8837,...
- To clot or coagulate, like blood.
- It battereth and cluttereth into knots and balls - 1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “[Book XII.]”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Naturall Historie...
- To make a confused noise; to bustle.
- It [the goose] clutter'd here, it chuckled there; / It stirr'd the old wife's mettle: / She shifted in her elbow-chair, / And hurl'd the pan and kettle. - 1832, Alfred Tennyson, “The Goose”, in Poems. […], volume I,...
- To utter words hurriedly, especially (but not exclusively) as a speech disorder (compare cluttering).