A small pointed tool used for making holes or separating threads in sewing; also historically a small dagger or a person of negligible importance.
Possibly from Irish 'bodóg' (dagger) or Middle English sources. The word entered English in the 14th-15th centuries and developed multiple meanings from the literal tool to metaphorical uses for a worthless person.
In Hamlet, when he contemplates suicide with a 'bare bodkin,' Shakespeare is using this little sewing tool as a symbol of something thin and insignificant—the weapon matches Hamlet's self-deprecating depression, a brilliant poetic choice.
Bodkins were precision tools historically used in textiles and clothing work, a trade dominated by women artisans whose technical expertise was rarely recorded or credited in trade histories.
Credit bodkin makers and users—primarily women seamstresses—as skilled craftspeople when discussing textile tool innovation.
Women textile workers developed bodkin refinements crucial to fine sewing; their tool innovations should be documented in craft history.
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