Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To utter without thinking; blurt.
- v. To sound or produce harshly or raucously: trombones blatting out a tune.
- v. To cry, especially like a sheep; bleat.
- v. To make a harsh or raucous noise.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To utter heedlessly; blurt out: as, he blatted the news.
- To talk inconsiderately or nonsensically; blather.
- To bleat.
Wiktionary
- v. To cry, as a calf or sheep; to bleat; to make a senseless noise; to talk inconsiderately.
- v. To produce an overrich or overblown sound on a brass instrument such as a trumpet, trombone, or tuba.
- n. Connections; relationships; one's social or business network.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. Low To cry, as a calf or sheep; to bleat; to make a senseless noise; to talk inconsiderately.
- v. Low To utter inconsiderately.
WordNet 3.0
- v. cry plaintively
Etymologies
- Russian блат, from Polish blat ("cover, umbrella") or Yiddish בלאַט ("leaf, list") (Wiktionary)
- Imitative. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The usual way to get a job in Russia is not by impressing at an interview, no, but by what is known as blat - "connections.”
“Old Billy Bumps uttered a challenging "blat" almost upon the tail of”
“The left rarely uses more than 5 words to blat thier tired mindless montras.”
Liberal bloggers admit conservatives have upper hand on Twitter
“I have done, I still loved it though! everytime I drove our shitty reject van with the command seat in the back flying around the place and the buttons all in the wrong place, and getting enough role out of it on a blat to make the oppo cringe!”
Oh How We Laughed……But Not Too Loudly. « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG
“His father reached across the wheel and pressed the horn, a bleat and a long blat.”
“The giant automaton let out its low blat sound as it stepped over Eva and Muthr swinging its long segmented arms.”
“With her own eyes she had seen the magnificent marble tomb erected on Latimar land, blat the man who had commissioned and watched its building, had ordered that he would not be laid therein.”
“Me - short blat later after rushing to attend a robbery report”
“Neither would have been my first, if I could have gotten a shot, but I had never used a doe blat until then.”
“I wonder about the musicians, if this is their full-time job, to blat and screech and crash, moving from one ceremony to the other with hardly a need to change the tunes.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘blat’.
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Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Down in the dumps, feeling blue? Here, then, is a list for you...
feeling blue, down in the dumps, blue devils, mulligrubs, mubblefubbles, melancholy, lugubrious, gloomy gus, eeyore, doleful, woeful, woebegone and 86 more...
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lester
sargasso, monolithic, idioms, nascent, sonances, arrhythmic, pap, dilettantish, fuzztone, effete, morass, waxed and 92 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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Infinite Jest
Words taken from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
prorector, monograph, post-fourier, snuffle, rototremble, creatus, enfilade, subanimalistic, balletic, espadrilles, leonine, cirri and 1153 more...
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The Other Side of Silence
A sound garden.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. --Walt Whitmantin cry, chark, gride, scroop, crepitation, stridulation, swazzle, death-ruckle, cronk, rumble, borborygmus, crowling and 165 more...
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splat
splat, blob, blorp, slop, spatter, spit, blip, blat, splatter, blot, drip, drib and 15 more...
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The Sirens of Titan
Words gathered while reading The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.
edwardian, rakehell, chrono-synclastic..., parvenu, chiton, dottle, ort, residua, narwhal, lulu, peyotl, peignoir and 49 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for blat.
bilby Good spot.
Nice visuals too. Sep 24, 2011
hernesheir Many Scandinavian and Dutch language newspaper names end(ed) in -blad. Along the lines of German Blatt, leaf. In this case, as in a leaf of paper, I should think. Sep 23, 2011
bilby Used by Damon Runyan in 1932 to mean newspaper.
"In fact, there is some mention of it in the blats."
- D. Runyan, 'Collier's' 21 Aug. 32/2. Sep 23, 2011