puckle, a kind of bugbear or goblin. Middleton, The Witch, i. 2 (Hecate). OE. pūcel, a goblin (NED.), dimin. of pūca; see [pouke].
puckling, little goblin; used as a term of endearment by a witch. Heywood, Witches of Lancs. ii. 1 (Mawd.); vol. iv, p. 187. See above.
pudder, pother, confusion, turmoil. King Lear, iii. 2. 50 (1623); Ford, Fancies Chaste, iii. 3 (Romanello). A common prov. word (EDD.).
pudding-time, in, in good time, lit. in time for dinner, as dinner often began with pudding. Like will to Like, in Hazlitt’s Dodsley, iii. 219; Butler, Hud. i. 2. 865. Still in use; see EDD.
pudding tobacco, tobacco compressed into sausage-like rolls. B. Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, ii. 1 (Mercury); Middleton, Roaring Girl, iii. 2 (Laxton).
pudency, modesty. Cymbeline, ii. 5. 11. L. pudentia, modesty.
pug, to pull, to tug; ‘What pugging by the ear!’, Appius and Virginia, in Hazlitt’s Dodsley, iv. 120. In prov. use from Warw. to Dorset, see EDD. (s.v. Pug, vb.2).
pug, a bargeman; ‘In a Westerne barge, when with a good winde and lustie pugges one may go ten miles in two daies’, Lyly, Endymion, iv. 2; Westerne pugs, men who navigated barges down the Thames to London; ‘The Westerne pugs receiving money there [in plague time] have tyed it in a bag at the end of their barge, and trailed it through the Thames’, Dekker, Wonderfull Yeare (NED.).
puggard, a thief (Cant). Middleton, Roaring Girl, v. 1 (Moll).
pugging tooth, Winter’s Tale, iv. 3. 7. Meaning uncertain. Usually taken as = thieving, cp. [puggard]. In Devon ‘pug-tooth’ means eye-tooth (EDD.). Possibly there may be a play of words here: Autolycus’s hungry eye-tooth (pug-tooth) set on edge tempts him to thieve (pug) ‘the white sheet bleaching on the hedge’.