bagatelle

Borrowed from French bagatelle, from Italian bagattella.

• IPA^(key): /ˌbæɡəˈtɛl/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

bagatelle (countable and uncountable, plural bagatelles)

1. A trifle; an insubstantial thing.

   Synonyms: bag of shells; see also Thesaurus:trifle

   • 1782, Charles Macklin, Love a-la-Mode, page 21:

     Sir C. Oh! dear madam, don't ask me, it's a very foolish song—a mere bagatelle.
     Char. Oh! Sir Callaghan, I will admit of no excuse.

   • 1850, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 68, page 226:

     […] the jails were larger and fuller, the number of murders was incomparably greater, the thefts and swindlings in the old country were a bagatelle to the large depredations there […]

   • 1879 September 6, “Railway Projects”, in Railway World, 5 (36): 853:

     The repayment of the cost of the western part of the road, whatever it might be, would be a mere bagatelle, for the older provinces would have been enriched by the stimulus given to business by the opening up of the plains, […]

   • 1996, Edmund White, “The tea ceremony”, in Ploughshares, volume 22, number 1, page 190:

     They'd purchased a little house in the eighth arrondissement in Paris that for them was just a bagatelle, since they rarely lived there.

2. (literature, music) A short piece of literature or of instrumental music, typically light or playful in character.
   • 2007, Norman Lebrecht, The Life And Death of Classical Music, page 7:

     One afternoon in 1920. a young pianist sat down in a shuttered room in the capital of defeated Germany and played a Bagatelle by Beethoven.

3. (uncountable) A game similar to billiards played on an oblong table with pockets or arches at one end only.
   • 1895, Hugh Legge, “The Repton Club”, in John Matthew Knapp, editor, The Universities and the Social Problem, page 139:

     For some time they did nothing save box, but at last they went down to the bagatelle room, and played bagatelle for a bit. They marked this advance in civilization by prodding holes in the ceiling with the bagatelle cues, which gave the ceiling the appearance of a cloth target after a Gatling gun had been shooting at it.

4. (uncountable) Any of several smaller wooden tabletop games developed from the original bagatelle in which the pockets are made of pins.

   Synonyms: pin bagatelle, hit-a-pin bagatelle, jaw ball

• carom
• pachinko
• pinball

bagatelle (third-person singular simple present bagatelles, present participle bagatelling, simple past and past participle bagatelled)

1. (intransitive, rare) To meander or move around, in a manner similar to the ball in the game of bagatelle.
   • 2019 September 28, Louise Taylor, “Henderson howler hands Liverpool narrow win at spirited Sheffield United”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     Admittedly Mané’s strike did rebound off a post as the ball bagatelled around the home area. It was characteristically cleared before Roberto Firmino could redirect the fall out beyond Henderson.

2. (transitive, rare) To bagatellize; to regard as a bagatelle.
   • 2004, Henryk Boder, translated by Broder Translators' Collective, edited by Sander L. Gilman and Lilian M. Friedberg, A Jew in the New Germany, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 64:

     That Saddam Hussein announced his intentions to destroy Israel a long time ago was either ignored or bagatelled. “We just didn't have time to address the threat to Israel,” explained Brigitte Erler on the eve of a large peace demonstration in Bonn.

• “bagatelle”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “bagatelle”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• “bagatelle”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.

Borrowed from Italian bagattella.

• IPA^(key): /ba.ɡa.tɛl/

• Audio:

  (file)

bagatelle f (plural bagatelles)

1. bagatelle, trinket, bauble
2. (food) trifle

• → Catalan: bagatel·la
• → Danish: bagatel
• → Dutch: bagatel
• → English: bagatelle
• → German: Bagatelle
• → Greek: μπαγκατέλα (bagkatéla)

• “bagatelle”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

bagatelle f

1. plural of bagatella

• gabellate