Word To Use Today: mantelet.

The Word Den tries very hard to provide something for everyone - and fails, obviously.

Still, in the word mantelet (it has come to us from French, but you say it MANTlit, all the same) I'm hoping we have a word to be of use to both the...I won't say ladies and gentlemen...but to the war-like and the peaceful.

(I can see I am getting myself deeper and deeper into trouble, here, so I shall shut up generalising and get on with the actual word stuff.)

A mantelet is a lady's short coat, often trimmed with lace, worn in the mid 1800s over a crinoline (you would have needed a specially-cut jacket to fit over a crinoline).


illustration by Johann Jacob Weber

For those of us with no intention of wearing a crinoline and, indeed, no interest in fashion at all, a mantelet (you can spell it mantlet if you like) is also a portable bullet-proof, or at least projectile-proof, screen or shelter:



Now, surely there is no one in the whole world who doesn't need the word in one of those meanings.

Is there?

(Look, I'm doing my best, here.)

Word To Use Today: mantelet. This word comes from the Old French and is a diminutive of mantel which means, yes, mantle.

PS I've just come across this household drying machine:


also called a mantelet. Similar things seem nowadays to be used as salad spinners. The patent was registered by a M Jean Mantelet.