beadle

• bedel, bedell (obsolete)
• bedral, bethral, betherel (Scotland)

From Middle English bedel, bidel, from Old English bydel (“warrant officer, apparitor”), from Proto-West Germanic *budil, from Proto-Germanic *budilaz (“herald”), equivalent to bid +‎ -le. Cognate with Dutch beul, German Büttel. More at bid.

• (UK) IPA^(key): [ˈbiːdəɫ]

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːdəl

beadle (plural beadles)

1. A parish constable, a uniformed minor (lay) official, who ushers and keeps order.
   • 1789, William Blake, “Holy Thursday”, in Songs of Innocence:

     Twas on a holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
     The children walking two and two in red and blue and green:
     Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
     Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.

   • 1852 March – 1853 September, Charles Dickens, chapter 11, in Bleak House, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1853, →OCLC, page 101:

     The beadle […] generally understood in the neighbourhood to be a ridiculous institution […] The policeman considers him an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the barbarous watchmen times, but gives him admission as something that must be borne with until government shall abolish him.

   • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 54, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume II, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC, page 142:

     Yes, yes, begad—of course you go out with him—it’s like the country, you know; everybody goes out with everybody in the Gardens, and there are beadles, you know, and that sort of thing—everybody walks in the Temple Gardens.

   • 1929 September, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, uniform edition, London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, […], published 1931 (April 1935 printing), →OCLC, page 9:

     His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman.

2. (Scotland, ecclesiastic) An attendant to the minister.
3. A warrant officer.

• Bedale, bealed, bedeal, belead