[U,C]
1 food put on a hook to catch fish or in nets, traps, etc. to catch animals or birds:
Live worms are used as bait. * The fish took the bait.
2 a person or thing that is used to catch sb or to attract them, for example to make them do what you want:
He had chosen the right bait to persuade her to go. * The police used him as bait to trap the killers.
verb [VN]
1 to place food on a hook, in a trap, etc. in order to attract or catch an animal:
He baited the trap with a piece of meat.
2 to deliberately try to make sb angry by making cruel or insulting remarks:
The soldiers remained calm even though the crowd was baiting them.
3 (- baiting) (in compound nouns) the activity of attacking a wild animal with dogs:
bear-baiting * badger-baiting
Rate this entry
About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for bait is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is bait a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, bait is tagged as noun.
Does bait appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — bait appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
