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droll

adj
/dɹəʊl/UK/dɹɒl//dɹoʊl/US/dɹoːɫ/CA

Etymology

From French drôle (“comical, odd, funny”), from drôle (“buffoon”) from Middle French drolle (“a merry fellow, pleasant rascal”) from Old French drolle (“one who lives luxuriously”), from Middle Dutch drol (“fat little man, goblin”), itself from Old Norse troll, from Proto-Germanic *truzlą. Doublet of drôle and troll.

  1. derived from *truzlą✻
  2. derived from troll
  3. derived from drol — “fat little man, goblin”
  4. derived from drolle — “one who lives luxuriously”
  5. derived from drolle — “a merry fellow, pleasant rascal”
  6. derived from drôle — “comical, odd, funny”

Definitions

  1. Oddly humorous

    Oddly humorous; whimsical, amusing in a quaint way; waggish.

    • Very droll, minister.
    • The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti—a famous company from Milan—is, without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld in my life. I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous.

  2. A funny person

    A funny person; a buffoon, a wag.

    • The lieutenant was a droll in his way, Peregrine possessed a great fund of sprightliness and good humour, and Godfrey, among his other qualifications already recited, sung a most excellent song […].
    • Our two inimitable drolls did a roaring trade with their broadsheets among lovers of the comedy element and nobody who has a corner in his heart for real Irish fun without vulgarity will grudge them their hardearned pennies.

  3. To jest, to joke.

  4. ›+ 2 more definitions

    1. The ghost of a child, especially one who died a painful death.

      • Drolls are spirits of young children who died a painful death. They can be heard, the Negroes say, crying piteously at night in deep swamps and deserted marshland.

    2. A surname from German.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for droll. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA