A gimlet is a hand tool for drilling small holes, mainly in wood, without splitting.
It was defined in Joseph Gwilt's Architecture (1859) as "a piece of steel of a semi-cylindrical form, hollow on one side, having a cross handle at one end and a worm or screw at the other".
The cutting action of the gimlet is slightly different from an auger and the initial hole it makes is smaller; the cutting edges pare away the wood, which is moved out by the spiral sides, falling out through the entry hole.
The name gimlet comes from the Old French guinbelet, guimbelet, later guibelet, probably a diminutive of the Anglo-French wimble, a variation of "guimble", from the Middle Low German wiemel (cf.
One example of this use is Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who was known as "Old Gimlet Eye".