Other forms: gimlets
A gimlet is a small tool for boring holes in wood. Bore it with a gimlet, a carpenter's gimlet, a gimlet hole.
It is a screw point on a cross handle and is turned by hand, which gives control a drill cannot, and it is still the neatest way to start a screw hole in soft wood. A gimlet eye is a piercing look, and a gimlet is also a gin and lime cocktail.
1noungimletA small tool for boring holes in wood.
“He used a gimlet to make a small hole before putting in the screw.”
gimlet is a tool.
Old French guimbelet is a diminutive of a word for a boring tool, related to wimble.
Middle Low German
wiemel
Anglo-Norman
wimble
Old French
guinbelet
Middle English
gimlet
English, today
gimlet
Built from
From Middle English gimlet etc., from Old French guinbelet, guimbelet, guibelet, probably a diminutive of the Anglo-Norman wimble, a variation of guimble (“drill”), from the Middle Low German wiemel; continued in Modern French as gibelet. Cocktail either named after the tool, in reference to its penetrating effects, or British Navy surgeon Thomas Gimlette (1857–1943).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA