bodkin [ME] The origin is perhaps Celtic linked with Irish bod, Welsh bidog, and Scottish Gaelic biodag ‘dagger’. This was the first sense recorded in English and is used by Shakespeare in Hamlet: ‘When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin’. Another early use was for a sharp instrument for piercing cloth; now, in needlework, a bodkin is, on the contrary, blunt with a large eye for threading tape and other thick threads through material, a use found from the early 18th century.