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Gauntlet   /gˈɔntlət/   Listen
noun
Gauntlet  n.  (Mil.) See Gantlet.


Gauntlet  n.  
1.
A glove of such material that it defends the hand from wounds. Note: The gauntlet of the Middle Ages was sometimes of chain mail, sometimes of leather partly covered with plates, scales, etc., of metal sewed to it, and, in the 14th century, became a glove of small steel plates, carefully articulated and covering the whole hand except the palm and the inside of the fingers.
2.
A long glove, covering the wrist.
3.
(Naut.) A rope on which hammocks or clothes are hung for drying.
To take up the gauntlet, to accept a challenge.
To throw down the gauntlet, to offer or send a challenge. The gauntlet or glove was thrown down by the knight challenging, and was taken up by the one who accepted the challenge; hence the phrases.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Gauntlet" Quotes from Famous Books



... gloves proscribed as the remembrances of the gauntlet cast down as a challenge? "This is the form of a trial by battle; a trial which the tenant or defendant in a writ of right has it in his election at this day to demand, and which was the only decision of such writ of right after ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.01 • Various
... But threw his gauntlet as a sacred pledge, His cause in combat the next day to try: 380 So been they parted both, with harts on edge To be aveng'd each on his enimy. That night they pas in joy and jollity, Feasting and courting both in bowre and hall; For Steward was excessive Gluttonie, 385 That of ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... hireling friends and partly enemies. The waters about the Bahamas and the Greater and Lesser Antilles were fields for the movements of hostile fleets, corsairs, and privateers. Yet the writer of this letter was tempted to run the gauntlet of these perils, expecting, if all went well, to arrive in ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... disarmed, his sword having been beaten out of his hand, disdained captivity, and provoked the English by opprobrious language to kill him. When John Copeland, who was governor of Roxborough Castle, advised him to yield, he struck him on the face with his gauntlet so fiercely, that he knocked out two of his teeth. Copeland conveyed him out of the field as his prisoner. Upon Copeland's refusing to deliver up his royal captive to the queen (Philippa), who stayed at Newcastle during the battle, the king ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... proclamations, by which she prohibited them from the free exercise of their religion; and, above all things, he insisted on the abandonment of the siege of Valenciennes, and the disbanding of the new levies. The stadtholderess's reply was one of haughty reproach and defiance. The gauntlet was now thrown down; no possible hope of reconciliation remained; and the whole country flew to arms. A sudden attempt on the part of the royalists, under Count Meghem, against Bois-le-duc, was repulsed by eight hundred men, commanded by an officer named Bomberg, in the immediate ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan


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