noun (informal) A small, not very useful object that people often pass on as an unwanted gift.
- They turned out to be the same sort of detritus as everything else. Junk and mathoms and useless geegaws.
— Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, The Pain of Unbelonging (2007)
- The first person to put a marker on a piece of land or ancestral mathom and say 'this is mine' was the first owner of capital, the first thief, the first magician.
— Stephen R. L. Clark, The Political Animal (1999)
- A mathom is an object you don't want but can't stand to give away or throw away. Do you have a mathom? Most of us do.
— Gail Carson Levine, Writing magic (2006)
