Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A young child.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A young child; an infant: a term carrying with it a shade of contempt.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Slightly contemptuous or depreciatory. A young or small child; an infant.
Etymologies
- Origin uncertain. Perhaps from band(s) (“swaddling clothes”) + -ling, or a modification of German Bänkling ("bastard child"), equivalent to bench + -ling. (Wiktionary)
- Origin unknown. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The Seraph, mightily confused at being called a bantling, giggled inanely, so I replied again.”
“I, poor fool, exulting in the splendid throes of accomplishment, never dreamed that the real christening of my bantling was the toast the Master of Hell drank as the name "Amalgamated" was slowly traced upon the pad before my eyes; never dreamed that this cherished offspring on whose rearing I had lavished all I possessed of dollars, of ideals, of generous hopes and high expectations -- whose growth I had literally watered with my sweat -- was an imp of darkness.”
“He looked over at Kenny, Well done, little bantling.”
“Do you, little bantling, kill everything you encounter?”
““Little bantling,” said Grahame with a sigh as he stopped admiring himself in the mirror.”
““Is this hedge-bantling to be fathered on you, Mr. Frank?””
““He breathes the vital air, the Doctor might say, through lungs; he moves erect, & has warm blood; the female brings forth her young alive, and rears the bantling at her breast.””
Thar She Blows! 19th-Century Court Case Harpoons a Whale of a Story
“I was a young author at the time, perhaps proud of my bantling: “I beg your pardon,” I say, “it was written by your humble servant.””
“If the gods, deliberating painfully together, have elaborated any skilful project, the giants are always willing to adopt it as their own, not treating the bantling as a foster child, but praising it and pushing it so that men should regard it as the undoubted offspring of their own brains.”
“She was one who would fain be doing something if she only knew how, and the first important attempt she made was to turn her respectable young Tory husband into a second-rate Whig bantling.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘bantling’.
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phrontistery - b
List of words from phrontistery.info
bywoner, byssus, byssiferous, byssaceous, byrnie, butyric, butyraceous, buttery, buteonine, bunting, burdet, broma and 582 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Quaintnesses
For those who wish no words were ever forgotten
opprobrium, tedium, encomium, odium, ire, enmity, beguile, wile, brazen, popinjay, squit, hoity-toity and 1161 more...
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Verrines of Random Palavery
broth of a man, broth of a boy, saturege, satureja, selachophobia, misopogonistically, prosiopesis, excave, intermicate, meletian, cone-anchor, goose wing and 454 more...
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lanklenmot's Words
ineluctable, prelapsarian, bien pensant, prospero, preternatural, gratifying, iconoclast, cineast, persnickety, tumescent, galvanize, pap and 887 more...
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How do you like Kipling?
Words which fit the joke format: "How do you like X-in(g)? I don't know, I've never X-ed".
kipling, duckling, fingerling, groundling, chickling, chitterling, changeling, gosling, yearling, hireling, inkling, quisling and 98 more...
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British Cant & Slang, Old & New
Mostly, the cant words come from my reprint of Francis Grose's 1785 dictionary of 'The Vulgar Tongue', while the more modern slang has been found at various online sources, e.g. this online diction...
bog-standard, bumbaclot, brown trouser moment, bingo wings, bobfoc, babber, sweating, tantadlin tart, taplash, timber toe, tray trip, twiddle-diddles and 209 more...
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fbharjo's Words
jumelle, kef, kenspeckle, lautitious, essentic, pilpulistic, impavid, cicurant, clou, chrysostomic, miasma, teleology and 1625 more...
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Words I Learned on FreeRice.com
A place for me to keep all these weird words, whether I guessed them correctly or not.
pennoncel, serval, tautological, redact, ganef, candent, shaitan, bifid, osteal, ensiform, helve, ecdysis and 100 more...
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William Steig
Linguistic exuberance from the childrens' books of William Steig
palsy-walsy, squoze, goosewit, oodles, as real as peas a..., clabber cheese, feeling his onions, lard, noggin, bantling, alackaday, flabbergasted and 55 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for bantling.

yarb At last Mrs. Bede took up her son, kissed his little head, and held him to her bosom. "My chick," she sobbed, "my itty-bitty bantling."
- William Steig, The Toy Brother Sep 14, 2008