plouter (plouters, present participle ploutering; past and past participle ploutered)

1. (Scotland, Ireland, northern England, dialect) To splash#Verb|splash around in something wet#Adjective|wet; to dabble#Verb|dabble.
   • 1894 May, Rudyard Kipling, “Servants of the Queen”, in The Jungle Book, London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published June 1894, OCLC 752934375 ↗, page 187 ↗:

     As I did not want to plowter about any more in the drizzle and the dark, I put my waterproof over the muzzle of one gun, and made a sort of wigwam with two or three rammers that I found, and lay along the tail of another gun, wondering where Vixen had got to, and where I might be.

2. (Scotland, Ireland, northern England, dialect) To potter#Verb|potter.
   • 1845 October – 1846 June​, Ellis Bell [pseudonym; Emily Brontë], chapter IX, in Wuthering Heights: A Novel, volume I, London: Thomas Cautley Newby, publisher, […], published December 1847, OCLC 156123328 ↗, page 187 ↗:

     He's left th' yate ut t' full swing, and miss's pony has trodden dahn two rigs uh corn, un plottered through, raight o'er intuh t' meadow!

   • 1922 February, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare & Co.; Sylvia Beach, OCLC 560090630 ↗; republished London: Published for the Egoist Press, London by John Rodker, Paris, October 1922, OCLC 2297483 ↗, page 703 ↗:

     [O]f course he prefers plottering about the house [...]

   • 1932, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, Polygon 2006 (A Scots Quair), p. 21:

     So one night after they had all had supper in the kitchen and old Sinclair had gone pleitering out to the byres, old Mistress Sinclair had up and nodded to Kirsty […].

   • 1986, Michael Innes, Appleby & Ospreys:

     There's certainly a small boat that people plouter about in.

plouter (plural plouters)

1. (Scotland, Ireland, northern England, dialect) The act of ploutering, or splashing about.