Other forms: bodkins
A bodkin is a blunt thick needle, or a small dagger. Thread a bodkin, use a bodkin, a bare bodkin.
The sewing bodkin has a large eye and a blunt point, made for threading elastic or ribbon through a channel rather than for piercing cloth. The dagger sense survives chiefly in Hamlet's line about a bare bodkin.
1nounbodkinA blunt thick needle, or a small dagger.
“The assassin hid a small bodkin in his sleeve.”
bodkin is a tool.
Middle English boydekin first meant a dagger, of uncertain origin.
Middle English
boydekin — dagger
English, today
bodkin
From Middle English boydekin (“dagger”), apparently from boyde, boide of unknown [cel -?] origin + -kin. Cognate with Scots botkin, boitkin, boikin (“bodkin”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA