Other forms: pellets
A pellet is a small hard rounded ball of something. Wood pellets, an air rifle pellet, feed pellets.
Pelleting compresses loose material into a dense uniform shape, which is why animal feed, wood fuel and medicines are all made this way — it stores better and doses evenly. An air rifle pellet is the ammunition. An owl pellet is the mass of bone and fur an owl coughs up, and pulling one apart is a standard school lesson in finding out what an owl ate. Note pelletise.
1nounpelletA small hard rounded ball of something.
“She fed the rabbits a handful of dry pellets every morning.”
pellet is a small ball.
Old French pelote means a small ball, a diminutive of Latin pila, a ball. Platoon comes from the same pelote, being a little ball of men.
Latin
pila — ball
Vulgar Latin
*pilotta
Old French
pelote — small ball
Middle English
pelote
English, today
pellet
Middle English pelote, pelet, from Old French pelote (“small ball”), from Vulgar Latin pilotta, diminutive of Latin pila (“ball”). a doublet of pelota.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA