setting-stick
1. A stick used for making holes for ‘setting’ or planting. Now dial.
| 1556 Withals Dict. (1562) 19 b, A dibell or settynge sticke, pastinum. 1658 Evelyn Fr. Gard. (1675) 233 Plant them with the setting-stick, or dibber. 1669 Worlidge Syst. Agric. vii. §4 (1681) 121 Make the holes with an ordinary Setting-stick. 1793 Trans. Soc. Arts (ed. 2) V. 54 The plant is then to be planted with a setting-stick so that the upper part of the root shall appear about half an inch out of the ground. 1817–8 Cobbett Resid. U.S. (1822) 66 A setting-stick which should be the top of a spade-handle cut off, about ten inches below the eye. 1886 Cheshire Gloss., Setting-stick, a short pointed stick, used for planting cabbages. |
† 2. A rod used for stiffening the plaits or ‘sets’ of ruffs, a poking-stick. Obs.
| 1575 Laneham Let. (1871) 37 Marshalld in good order: wyth a stetting [sic] stick, and stoout, that euery ruff stood vp like a wafer. 1583 Stubbes Anat. Abus. ii. 36 They haue also another instrument called a setting sticke,..and with this they set their ruffes. 1615 Howes Stow's Chron. 948/2 About the sixteenth yeere of the Queene, began the making of steele poking-stickes, and vntill that time all Lawndresses vsed setting stickes, made of wood, or bone. 1621 Burton Anat. Mel. iii. ii. ii. (iii.) iii. 568 Pots, glasses, oyntments, irons, combes, bodkins, setting stickes. |
3. A composing-stick.
| 1875 Southward Dict. Typogr. (ed. 2) 123. |