different between waddy vs quarterstaff

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?w?di/

Etymology 1

Unknown

Noun

waddy (plural waddies)

1. (colloquial) A cowboy.
   • 1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses:

     This is how it was with the old waddies, aint it?

   • 1968, Charles Portis, True Grit:

     If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar.

Etymology 2

From Dharug wadi (“stick, weapon”).

Alternative forms

• waddie

Noun

waddy (plural waddies)

1. (Australia) A war club used by Aboriginal Australians; a nulla nulla.
   • 1839, William Mann, Six Years' Residence in the Australian Provinces, page 156,

     After waiting for some time, and nothing being done, I began to think that the settlement tribes were afraid of the mountaineers, whose chosen warriors advanced in a line, striking their shields with their waddies, singing their war-cry, wa-ah ! wa-ah ! wa-ah ! aa-ho ! aa-ho ! aa-ho ! hi-hi-hi !—I should have told you that many of the Amity Paint tribe, which is more numerous than the other two settlement tribes, were deficient of spears and shields, having nothing but waddies and boomerangs.

   • 1840 May—August, Robert Montgomery Martin (editor), Van Diemen's Land, The Colonial Magazine and Commercial-maritime Journal, Volume 2, page 76,

     In the mean while women, children, and remote stock-keepers fell under the unerring spears or death-dealing waddies of an enemy, the first indication of whose appearance was consectaneous with the stroke that reft his victim of life.

   • 2008, Doreen Kartinyeri, Sue Anderson, Doreen Kartinyeri: My Ngarrindjeri Calling, page 20,

     The kids would copy the men to make their own cricket stumps, but no-one was allowed to touch Grandfather's special wood for making waddies.

2. A piece of wood; a stick or peg; also, a walking stick.

Derived terms

• waddywood

Verb

waddy (third-person singular simple present waddies, present participle waddying, simple past and past participle waddied)

1. (transitive) To attack or beat with an Aboriginal war club.

Anagrams

• Dawdy

English

Alternative forms

• quarter-staff
• quarter staff

Etymology

quarter +? staff, attested since about 1550. Probably originally referred to a staff cut from the heartwood of a certain size of tree which was cleft into four parts, per the OED.

Pronunciation

• (US) IPA^(key): /?kw??t???stæf/

Noun

quarterstaff (plural quarterstaffs or quarterstaves)

1. A wooden staff of an approximate length between 2 and 2.5 meters, sometimes tipped with iron, used as a weapon in rural England during the Early Modern period.
   • 1600, William Kempe, Kemps nine daies vvonder:

     Name my accu?er ?aith he, or I defye thee Kemp at the quart ?taffe.

2. Fighting or exercise with the quarterstaff.

   He was very adept at quarterstaff.

   • 1883, Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood:

     First, several couples stood forth at quarterstaff, and so shrewd were they at the game, and so quickly did they give stroke and parry, that […]

Usage notes

An attestation from 1590 of a quarter Ashe staffe shows that the "quarter" was an apposition and could still be detached (Richard Harvey, Plaine Perceuall the peace-maker of England , cited after the OED). Joseph Swetnam (1615) uses "quarterstaff" in the same sense in which George Silver (1599) had used "short staff", viz. for the staff between about 2 and 2.5 meters in length, as opposed to the "long staff" of a length exceeding 3 meters.

Contemporary use of the word disappears during the 18th century, and beginning with 19th-century Romanticism the word is mostly limited to antiquarian or historical usage.

Synonyms

• bo (a Japanese quarterstaff)
• short staff

Translations