Batten - What does it mean?
batten | |
To become better; improve in condition, especially by feeding.
To feed (on); to revel (in).
* 1890 , (Oscar Wilde), The Picture of Dorian Gray , ch. XIV:
To thrive by feeding; grow fat; feed oneself gluttonously.
* Garth
* Emerson
To thrive, prosper, or live in luxury, especially at the expense of others; fare sumptuously.
To gratify a morbid appetite or craving; gloat.
To improve by feeding; fatten; make fat or cause to thrive due to plenteous feeding.
* Milton
To fertilize or enrich, as land.
A thin strip of wood used in construction to hold members of a structure together or to provide a fixing point.
(nautical) A long strip of wood, metal, fibreglass etc used for various purposes aboard ship, especially one inserted in a pocket sewn on the sail in order to keep the sail flat.
In stagecraft, a long pipe, usually metal, affixed to the ceiling or fly system in a theater.
The movable bar of a loom, which strikes home or closes the threads of a woof.
The difference between batten and is:
batten
English
Etymology 1
From (etyl) *.Verb
(en verb)- The brain had its own food on which it battened , and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
- The pampered monarch lay battening in ease.
- Skeptics, with a taste for carrion, who batten on the hideous facts in history
- ''Robber barons who battened on the poor
- battening our flocks