rabbit

Meanings

Noun

• A mammal of the family Leporidae, with long ears, long hind legs and a short, fluffy tail.
• The meat from this animal.
• The fur of a rabbit typically used to imitate another animal's fur.
• A runner in a distance race whose goal is mainly to set the pace, either to tire a specific rival so that a teammate can win or to help another break a record; a pacesetter.
• A very poor batsman; selected as a bowler or wicket-keeper.
• A large element at the beginning of a list of items to be bubble sorted, and thus tending to be quickly swapped into its correct position. Compare turtle.
• Rarebit; Welsh rabbit or a similar dish: melted cheese served atop toast.
• A pneumatically-controlled tool used to insert small samples of material inside the core of a nuclear reactor.

Verb

• To hunt rabbits.
• To flee.
• To talk incessantly and in a childish manner; to babble annoyingly.
• Confound; damn; drat.

Related

Similar words

• bunny (hypocoristic, colloquial, pet name)
• bunny rabbit (hypocoristic, colloquial, pet name)
• coney, cony (dialect)
• : run off, scamper, bolt

Narrower meaning words

• bunny rabbit
• jackrabbit

Origin

• From Middle English rabet, rabette, from Middle French *robotte, *rabotte or Anglo-Latin rabettus, from dialectal Old French rabotte, probably a diminutive of Middle Dutch or West Flemish robbe, perhaps related to robbe, itself of uncertain origin; possibly some imitative verb, maybe robben, rubben is used here to allude to a characteristic of the animal. See rub.
• Related forms include Middle French rabouillet and in French rabot), coming via Walloon Old French (reflected nowadays as Walloon robète), from Middle Dutch robbe; also Middle Low German robbe, rubbe, and the later Low German Rubbe, West Frisian robbe, Saterland Frisian Rubbe, North Frisian rob, borrowed into German Robbe.
• From Cockney rhyming slang rabbit and pork, to talk.
• Perhaps a corruption of rabate.