knee-timber, crooked timber, used in shipbuilding. Bacon, Essay 13.
knight of the post, a notorious perjurer; one who gets his living by giving false evidence. Brome, Joviall Crew (Works, 1873, iii. 366); Marlowe, tr. of Ovid’s Elegies, i. 10. 37; Otway, Soldier’s Fortune, i. 1 (Courtine). [Cp. Pope, Prologue to the Satires of Horace, 365, ‘Knight of the post corrupt, or of the Shire.’] See Nares.
Knight’s Ward, one of the four prison-divisions or ‘sides’. There were usually but three such divisions, the Master’s side, the Twopenny Ward, and the Hole; See [counter] (3). When there were four, the Knight’s Ward came second. In Eastward Ho, v. 1 (or 2), Wolf says ‘the knight will i’ the Knight’s Ward’, meaning that he was too humble to go into the Master’s side. Also Knight-side, ‘Neither lie on the Knight-side, nor in the Twopenny Ward’, Webster, Appius, iii. 4 (Corbulo). And see Westward Ho, iii. 2 (Monopoly).
knill, knyll, to sound as a bell, ring. Morte Arthur, leaf 428*, back, 6; bk. xxi, c. 10; OE. cnyllan, to strike, ring a bell (B. T. Suppl.).
knitting-cup, a cup of wine drunk by the company immediately after a wedding. B. Jonson, Magn. Lady, iv. 1 (Compass).
knokylbonyarde, a contemptible fellow. Skelton, Magnyfycence, 485. Dyce’s note gives two other examples. Deriv. of knucklebone.
knot, a flower-bed. Lyly, Euphues, p. 37; Campaspe, iii. 4 (Apelles); Tusser. Husb. § 22. 22. In prov. use in Somerset, Dorset, and Devon, also in the west Midlands, see EDD. (s.v. Knot, sb.1 13).
knot, the red-breasted sandpiper; ‘The knot that called was Canutus’ bird of old’, Drayton, Pol. xxv. 341; ‘Knotts, i, Canuti aves, ut opinor’, Camden, Brit. (ed. 1607, 408). Dan. knot, sandpiper (Larsen). In the north of Ireland the name for the ringed plover, see EDD. (s.v. Knot, sb.2).
knot-grass, a plant with small pale-pink flowers, Polygonum aviculare. An infusion of it was supposed to stunt one’s growth. Mids. Night’s D. iii. 2. 329; Beaumont and Fl., Knt. of the B. Pestle, ii. 2 (Wife).
knowledge, to acknowledge; ‘I knowlege my folly’, Sir T. Elyot, Governour, bk. i, c. 12, § 3; ‘My flight from prison I knowledge’, Stanyhurst, tr. of Aeneid, ii. 150.