bicker

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈbɪkə/

  Rhymes: -ɪkə(r)

Middle English bikeren ‘to attack’, from Middle Dutch bicken ‘to stab, attack’ (modern bikken ‘to hack’), from Proto-Germanic *bikjaną (compare Old English becca ‘pickax’, German picken ‘to peck, pick at’, Old Norse bikkja ‘to plunge into water’), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeg- ‘to smash, break’.

bicker (third-person singular simple present bickers, present participle bickering, simple past and past participle bickered)

1. To quarrel in a tiresome, insulting manner.

   They bickered about dinner every evening.

   • Barrow

     petty things about which men cark and bicker

2. To brawl or move tremulously, quiver, shimmer (of a water stream, light, flame, etc.)
   • XIX cent, The Brook, by Tennyson

     I come from haunts of coot and hern, / I make a sudden sally, / And sparkle out among the fern, / To bicker down a valley.

   • Thomson

     They [streamlets] bickered through the sunny shade.

3. (of rain) To patter.
4. To skirmish; to exchange blows; to fight.
   • Holland

     Two eagles had a conflict, and bickered together.

• wrangle
• See also Thesaurus:squabble

• bickerer

bicker (plural bickers)

1. A skirmish; an encounter.
2. (Scotland, obsolete) A fight with stones between two parties of boys.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Jamieson to this entry?)

3. A wrangle; also, a noise, as in angry contention.

From Scots bicker, from Middle English biker (compare beaker).

bicker (plural bickers)

1. (Scotland) A wooden drinking-cup or other dish.
   • 1824, James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Oxford 2010, p. 6:

     …the liquors were handed around in great fulness, the ale in large wooden bickers, and the brandy in capacious horns of oxen.

• bicker in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• bicker in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

• Bicker in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition, 1911)