Plural of hamlet; small villages or settlements with fewer inhabitants than a town.
Regular plural of 'hamlet,' which comes from Old French 'hamelet,' a diminutive of 'ham' (village). The diminutive ending shows it's intentionally a smaller version of a village.
Shakespeare's Hamlet is technically named after a small village (Elsinore, in Denmark), so the character's very name ties him to small-town isolation—a brilliant bit of symbolic naming.
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