Other forms: baubles
A bauble is a showy trinket of little value. A glass bauble, cheap baubles, a bauble on the tree.
In Britain it is above all the coloured ball on a Christmas tree. Used of anything else it dismisses the thing as worthless show. Cromwell called the parliamentary mace a bauble when he dissolved the Rump, which is the word's most famous outing.
1nounbaubleA showy trinket of little value.
“She wore a cheap plastic bauble on a chain and said it was a diamond.”
bauble is a trinket.
BAUBLE → shiny as a BUBBLE and worth as little
It shines like a bubble on the tree and is worth about as much.
hooks ontobubble
Old French baubel meant a child's toy or trinket, probably a reduplication of a word meaning pretty.
Latin
bellus — pretty
Old French
babel
Middle English
bable
English, today
bauble
Built from
From Middle English bable, babel, babull, babulle, from Old French babel, baubel (“trinket, child's toy”), most likely a reduplication of bel, ultimately from Latin bellus (“pretty”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA