English

Alternative forms

• paulter

Verb

palter ‎(third-person singular simple present palters, present participle paltering, simple past and past participle paltered)

1. To talk insincerely; to prevaricate or equivocate in speech or actions.
   • Shakespeare

     Romans, that have spoke the word, / And will not palter.

   • Tennyson

     Who never sold the truth to serve the hour, / Nor paltered with eternal God for power.

   • 1922, Michael Arlen, chapter 2/4/1, in “Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days:

     But, with a gesture, she put a period to this dalliance—one shouldn't palter so on an empty stomach, she might almost have said.

   • 2010, Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

     I would prevaricate and palter in my usual plausible way, but, this being Cambridge, such stratagems would cut no ice with my remorseless and (in my imagination) gleefully malicious interrogator, who would stare at me with gimlet eyes and say in a harsh voice that crackled with mocking laughter: ‘Excuse me, but do you even know who Lermontov is?’

2. (now rare) To trifle.
   • Beaumont and Fletcher

     Palter out your time in the penal statutes.

   • 1886, Henry James, The Princess Casamassima.

     He waited and waited, in the faith that Schinkel was dealing with them in his slow, categorical Teutonic way, and only objurgated the cabinetmaker for having in the first place paltered with his sacred trust. Why hadn't he come straight to him—whatever the mysterious document was—instead of talking it over with French featherheads?

   • 1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, Vintage Classics, paperback edition, page 100

     Don't palter with the second rate.

3. To haggle.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Cotgrave to this entry?)

4. To babble; to chatter.

Derived terms

• palterer

Translations

Anagrams

• plater