The plug of unburned tobacco left in the bottom of a pipe after smoking.
Origin uncertain, possibly from 'dot' or 'dolt,' or related to Dutch/German words for stopping or plugging; the exact etymology is disputed among scholars.
Dottle is a distinctly British English word that shows up in pipe-smoking literature—it's one of those hyper-specific vocabulary items that tells us what a culture values and how they spend their time, kind of like how the Inuit languages aren't actually full of snow words, but English pipe-smokers needed one for that tobacco plug.
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