▪ I. boots1
(buːts)
[pl. of boot n.3, used as sing.]
1. A name for the servant in hotels who cleans the boots; formerly called boot-catcher and -catch.
| a 1798 O'Keefe Fontainebleau iii. i. (L.) Your honour will remember the waiter..Your honour won't forget Jack Boots. 1836–7 Dickens Sk. Boz (1850) 250/1 ‘I'm the boots as b'longs to the house.’ 1856 W. Collins After Dark I. 109, I waited in the pantry till Boots had brushed the clothes. |
2. (slang.) An appellation given to the youngest officer in a regiment, junior member of a club, etc.
| 1806 Sir R. Wilson in Life (1862) I. ii. 60 My chief resistance to discipline was at mess where I could not brook the duties of Boots. |
3. In various comb. (humorous or colloq.) = ‘Fellow, person’: as clumsy-boots, lazy-boots; see also sly-boots, smooth-boots.
| 1623 Percivale Sp. Dict., Lisongero, a flatterer, a smooth boots. 1865 Dickens Mut. Fr. iv. xi, You are the most creasing and tumbling Clumsy-Boots of a packer. 1832 Lytton Eugene A. ii, ‘Why don't you rise, Mr. Lazyboots?’ |
▪ II. † boots2 Obs. or dial.
[prob. a dial. form of bouts, bolts, applied to the same plant.]
A local English name of marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) or meadow bouts.
| 1597 Gerard Herbal cclxxx. §3. 671 Marsh Marigoldes, in Cheshire and those parts it is called Bootes. 1721 Bailey, Boots, the Plant Marshmallows [An error]. |