Other forms: mallets
A mallet is a hammer with a big soft head — wood, rubber or hide — that drives something home without leaving a dent. Tapping a chisel through a piece of oak, knocking tent pegs into hard ground, seating a paint tin lid without buckling it.
The soft head is the whole point: a steel hammer would bruise the wood and split the chisel handle, while a mallet spreads the blow. A rubber mallet lives in a car boot for hubcaps and stubborn parts; a wooden one lives on a workbench. It has no claw and drives no nails, and that is the line between a mallet and a hammer. The long-handled sticks swung in croquet and polo are mallets as well, aimed at a ball rather than at wood. So are the padded sticks a percussionist uses on a xylophone.
1nounmalletA hammer with a large head of wood, rubber or hide, used where a metal head would damage the surface.~38%
“He tapped the joint together with a wooden mallet.”
synonyms: beetle
2nounlongA long-handled stick with a head, used to hit the ball in croquet and polo.~37%
“She lined up the shot and swung the mallet gently.”
3nounsoftA stick with a soft or hard head, used to strike a xylophone, marimba or drum.~25%
“He switched to softer mallets for the quiet passage.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
mallet is a hammer.
Middle English
maylet
English, today
mallet
From Middle English maylet.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA