Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To strike; give a blow to; knock.
  • In packing herrings, to jump upon (the head of the barrel) in order to pack it more tightly.
  • To confuse by noise; stupefy.
  • To beat; palpitate, as the heart.
  • noun A stroke; a blow.
  • noun A malady characterized by staggering, observed particularly in yearling lambs.
  • noun Palpitation.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete A blow.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Scotland A stroke; a dull-sounding blow
  • verb Scotland To strike; give a blow to; knock.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English dunt, dynt, from Old English dynt ("dint, blow, strike, stroke, bruise, stripe, thud, the mark or noise of a blow, a bruise, noise, crash"), from Proto-Germanic *duntiz (“shock, blow”), from Proto-Indo-European *dhen- (“to beat, push”). Cognate with Swedish dialectal dunt ("stroke").

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Examples

Comments

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  • "Sometimes the wind dunted the doors extra hard and made them swing inward and admit a hissing draught." - from Lanark, by Alistair Gray. It appears that parts of this novel were published as early as 1969 while the definitive version is from 1981.

    November 19, 2007

  • Citation on blethers.

    July 11, 2009

  • Stupefied, numbed. Old provincial term from Norfolk England. "How you dunt me, saying of a mother to a crying child. A dunt sheep, one that mopes about, from a disorder in his head." --Grose's A Provincial Glossary, 1787.

    May 7, 2011

  • (verb/adjective) - (1) To knock with a dull sound, as with the fist in the back or ribs. Stupid, dizzy, or giddy, from an affection of the brain; said especially of sheep. --Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1897 (2) To stupefy. --Rev. Robert Forby's Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830 (3) Stupefied. Dunt sheep, one that mopes about from a disorder in his head; Norfolk. --Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1796

    February 12, 2018