I. From the sb.
1. Shaped like a club, thickened at or toward the end, knobbed; clavate, claviform.
c. 1386. Chaucer, Monk’s Prol., 10. She bryngeth me forth the grete clobbed [v.r. clubbed, clobbet] staues.
c. 1440. Promp. Parv., 84. Clubbyd staffe, fustis.
1526. Skelton, Magnyf., 1512. Hercules … with hys stubborne clubbyd mase.
1783. Phil. Trans., LXXIII. 219. Their antennæ are clubbed.
1850. ‘Bat,’ Cricketer’s Manual, 24. Two sets of players are arranged with bent or clubbed sticks.
b. as a defect or distortion of the foot or fingers; also (obs.) of a person: Club-footed, etc.
a. 1509. in Gardner, Lett. Rich. III. & Hen. VII. A clobbed fote.
a. 1605. Montgomerie, Misc. P., xiii. 30. Love maks a couard kene; Love maks the clubbit clene.
1806–7. J. Beresford, Miseries Hum. Life, XVI. (1826), 90. Your fingers so clubbed at the ends.
1881. Syd. Soc. Lex., Clubbed fingers, a term applied to the thin fingers with thickened ends, which are often seen in phthisical persons.
2. Lumpy, massively built, thick-set.
1695. Lond. Gaz., No. 3143/4. Stolen … one black clubbed Gelding. Ibid. (1702), No. 3850/4. Stolen or strayed … a clubbed bob-tail’d black Mare … a little low Back’d.
c. 1440. Promp. Parv., 84. Clubbyd, or boystows, rudis.
1548. Forrest, Pleas. Poesye, 88. That wone clubbed Cobbe should not so encroche an hundred mennys lyuynges.
II. From the verb.
4. Formed into a club or knot; clenched.
1625. Purchas, Pilgrims, II. iii. § 6. The Pongoes … so beate them with their clubbed fists.
1885. Leisure Hour, Jan., 34/1. The ambition of warriors’ hearts being the cultivation of ‘clubbed pigtails’ of abnormal length and thickness.
5. Turned into or used as a club.
1724. De Foe, Mem. Cavalier (1840), 179. Coming close up to the teeth of one another with the clubbed musket.
1881. G. A. Henty, Cornet of Horse, x. 102. Bayonets and clubbed muskets, these were the weapons on both sides.
6. Combined in a mass; thrown into a confused and disorganized mass, as a clubbed battalion.
1823. Lamb, Elia, I. ix. (1860), 70. The waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds.
1876. World, V. No. 105. 11. Does not marshal his incidents very adroitly, they assume sometimes something of a ‘clubbed‘ formation.
