h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I decided that I would pick on two entirely random researchers on-line and drop the word trebuchet on them. Just because I can. I have no feeling either way about whether the word is appropriate or not in your case... but perhaps you have space for it in your life.
Now That I have done this... you could choose two more random researchers and send them The Word too.

No idea who you are but I know what a trebuchet is. It is quite a common word where I work. We sell furniture and trebuchet is the French word for the little pegs which hold up the shelves. Funnily enough I'm not really sure what we call them in English.

So Mr (Miss?) thidwick - welcome to hootoo. It's an unconventional way to start your life here, but it's obviously working. Hang around the "Ask" page for a while - most of the stuff goes on there.

The only meaning of trebuchet that I know of is a large wooden catapult siege engine for chucking rocks etc at enemy fortifications.
I'm quite fascinated by the furniture connection.
I wonder if "trebuchet" has a literal (dictionary) meaning in french.
Could be "Trebuchet (n) Small wooden peg for holding up shelves". If so, how did it come to be associated with very large siege engines?

traboccare - Italian - means to sling or throw - or overflow (even with emotions.)

trabocchétto - is a trap door

Sorry to butt in, but words fascinate me.

I don't have a French-Danish dictionary (only Danish-French) and the Italian one was the closest at hand.

Danish hasn't got a word with similarities to the French and/or Italian.

*Goes googling*

Google apparently presents a world of trebuchets. Here's a beginner's page http://www.ripcord.ws/

Sometimes great threads of conversation need a little push. Or 'pushay' as the French so foppishly put it.

I too am interested in words and my analysis is that 'trebuchet' must be from the words 'tree' meaning 'tree' (from which we get the wood) and 'buchet' meaning 'mouth or bucket'.
It is easy to imagine those little pegs as wooden teeth 'dans les bouches' and of course we all know that as the tree bends so it will fling.

No doubt a variety of medieval wooden devices like the trap door mentioned above will involve variants on the open mouthed tree bucket.

~jwf~

I hope that tree and bucket theory was , jwf.

The "traboccare" sounds the most plausible to me. (Are we playing Call my Bluff here?)

Traboccare means, as far as I can judge, without checking anywhere on the web or in a dictionary: "to traverse the mouth" - which would mean that the trebuchet is more likely a catapult than a peg.