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''gimlet'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260915190735-00-⌔

gimlet - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Noun

gimlet (plural gimlets)

  • A small screw - tipped tool for boring holes.
    • ✤ Coordinate terms: auger, awl, drill
    • ✤ The box was close on every side, with a little door for me to go in and out, and a few gimlet holes to let in air.1
    • ✤ I would find by the edge of that water/The collar-bone of a hare/Worn thin by the lapping of water,/And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare […]2
  • A cocktail, usually made with gin and lime juice.
    • ✤ Coordinate term: martini
    • ✤ We sat in a corner of the bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”3
    • ✤ Yeah, a piece of advice — once you’re back in circulation, don’t keep topping off a lady’s vodka gimlet when she’s not looking.4
    • ✤ By seven, dinner was under way, and a bottle of vodka gimlets and one of martinis were in the freezer, chilling.5

Verb

gimlet (third-person singular simple present gimlets, present participlegimleting or gimletting, simple past and past participlegimleted or gimletted)

  • To pierce or bore holes (as if using a gimlet).
    • ✤ Then there was an awful silence. The lady gimleted us again one by one with her blue eyes.6
  • (nautical, transitive) To turn round (an anchor) as if turning a gimlet.

Etymology

From Middle English gimlet etc., from Old French guinbelet, guimbelet, guibelet, probably a diminutive of the Anglo-Norman wimble, a variation of guimble (“drill”), from the Middle Low German wiemel; continued in Modern French as gibelet.7

Cocktail either named after the tool, in reference to its penetrating effects, or British Navy surgeon Thomas Gimlette (1857–1943).8

Pronunciation

  • (UK, General American) IPA: /ˈɡɪm.lət/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɪmlət

Printed 2026-09-15.

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Footnotes

  1. 1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. […] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume I, London: […] Benj[amin] Motte, […], →OCLC, part II (A Voyage to Brobdingnag): ↩

  2. 1917 November, W[illiam] B[utler] Yeats, “The Collar-bone of a Hare”, in The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Verses and a Play in Verse, Churchtown, Dundrum[Dublin]: The Cuala Press, →OCLC, page 3: ↩

  3. 1953, Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, published 2002, page 19: ↩

  4. 2001, General Hospital (TV soap opera, August 28): ↩

  5. 2012, Stuart Woods, Unnatural Acts: A Stone Barrington Novel, Penguin, →ISBN, page 98: ↩

  6. 1904, E[dith] Nesbit, “”, in New Treasure Seekers, London: Ernest Benn, →OCLC: ↩

  7. John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “gimlet”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN. ↩

  8. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “gimlet”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩