pestal

Pestal is a term with no widely recognized meaning in standard English. In contemporary usage, pestal is most often encountered as a misspelling or typographical variant of pestle, the blunt tool used in conjunction with a mortar to grind, crush, or mix substances. Because pestle is the established form, pestal generally does not denote a separate object or concept in dictionaries or technical writing.

The etymology of pestle is tied to historical spellings such as pestel in Old French, and the word has long been fixed in English as pestle. When pestal appears in texts, it is typically a mistake rather than an intentional term, and it may arise from typographical error, OCR misreads, or mispronunciation. In rare cases, pestal may appear as a proper noun, for example as a surname or a place name in historical records, but such uses are not common and carry no universal definition beyond the name itself.

Because pestal lacks a distinct, standardized meaning, the recommended practice is to correct it to pestle in general prose, unless the context clearly indicates a proper noun. For readers and writers, the key distinction is that pestle refers to the grinding tool, while pestal should be treated with caution as either a nonstandard spelling or a potential proper noun.

See also: pestle, mortar and pestle, spelling variations.