kilt

present singular third person kilts · participle present kilting · participle past kilted · past kilted · alternative obsolete kelt · alternative obsolete quelt

1. To gather up (skirts) around the body.First known use 14th c.

   Else at her new place worked outdoor and indoor, she'd to kilt her skirts (if they needed kilting – and that was damned little with those short-like frocks) and go out and help at the spreading of dung […].

   1933, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Cloud Howe (A Scots Quair), Polygon, published 2006, page 385

plural kilts · alternative obsolete kelt · alternative obsolete quelt

1. A traditional Scottish garment, usually worn by men, having roughly the same morphology as a wrap-around skirt, with overlapping front aprons and pleated around the sides and back, and usually made of twill-woven worsted wool with a tartan pattern.First known use 18th c.
2. historicalAny Scottish garment from which the above lies in a direct line of descent, such as the philibeg, or the great kilt or belted plaid
3. A plaid, pleated school uniform skirt sometimes structured as a wraparound, sometimes pleated throughout the entire circumference; also worn by boys in the 19th-century United States.

   I was about to say that I had known the Celebrity from the time he wore kilts. But I see I will have to amend that, because he was not a celebrity then, nor, indeed, did he achieve fame until some time after I left New York for the West.

   1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter I, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

4. A variety of non-bifurcated garments made for men and loosely resembling a Scottish kilt, but most often made from different fabrics and not always with tartan plaid designs.

alternative killt

1. colloquialnonstandardobsoleteespecially Ireland or African-American VernacularNonstandard form of killed: simple past and past participle of kill.

   that unspotted Lamb, That for the Sins of all the World was kilt

   1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto X”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

   5 more examples

   ‘Well, one Sunday morning, I took ‘Brown Betsy,’ my old two shooter, and all the dogs, and off I sot for the cane brake in the hollow, over back of Ike Hamberlin’s, the steam doctor’ — for I know’d Ike would be tarnation riley if I kilt a bar any where close to his clearin, and that made me sorter ambitious like.

   1849 November 10, The Spirit of the Times, New York, page 542, column 3

   This lamentation was stopped short by Mr. Consadine: "There is no manner of doubt about it," said he. "It was Barry that kilt my best cow, and all he has left me is the hide o' the poor baste to comfort myself with; but it will be a warnin' to Dick Consadine, for the rest of his life, nivir again to play off his thricks upon thravellers."

   1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 542

   We even concede the presence of Daniel Boone, because he “kilt a bar” and made a note of it on the bark of a tree away out West on the Kentucky frontier.

   1915 October 9, The Los Angeles Times, page 4, column 3

   But tweren’t so awful long before Marse Hampton got kilt in de big battle, and Marse Thad, too. Dey was both kilt in de charge, right dere on de breastworks, with de guns in dey hands, dem two young masters of mine, right dere in dat Gettysburg battle […] And I was eighteen in dat October after dat big fight what Marse Thad and Marse Hampton got kilt in.

   1970 (reprinted 1999) Norman R. Yetman (ed.), Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives, Courier Corporation, p. 160

   She could fight, too, when I got snuffy. […] Once I come home from elk camp so drunk I couldn't hardly sit my horse, and Sylvie near to kilt me, she fought me so hard.

   2014, Howard Frank Mosher, North Country: A Personal Journey Through the Borderland