droll - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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.[1] Doublet of drôle and troll.

droll (comparative droller, superlative drollest)

  1. Oddly humorous; whimsical, amusing in a quaint way; waggish.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:witty
    Very droll, minister.
    • 1846, Charles Dickens, “Genoa and Its Neighbourhood”, in Pictures from Italy, London: […] Bradbury & Evans, […], →OCLC, page 68:
      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.

oddly humorous; whimsical

droll (plural drolls)

  1. (archaic) A funny person; a buffoon, a wag.
    • 1751, [Tobias] Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC:
      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 […] .
    • 1922 February, James Joyce, “[Episode 12: The Cyclops]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], →OCLC, part II [Odyssey], page 294:
      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.

(archaic in English) a funny person; a buffoon, a wag

droll (third-person singular simple present drolls, present participle drolling, simple past and past participle drolled)

  1. (archaic, intransitive) To jest, to joke.

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium. Particularly: “perhaps from EN "troll"”)

droll (plural drolls)

  1. (Gullah folklore) The ghost of a child, especially one who died a painful death.

    • 1938, The Ocean Highway: New Brunswick, New Jersey to Jacksonville, Florida‎[1], page 204:
      HAMILTON’S HILL, 0.4 m., a little elevation, was the starting point for the races, and is known for a wide variety of ghosts including such fearsome creatures as a 10-foot cat that explodes before the beholder’s eyes, plat-eyes in the guise of three-legged hogs and two-headed cows, boo-daddies, boo-hags, and drolls. The drolls are supposed to be the spirits of infants who died painful deaths.
    • 1941, South Carolina Folk Tales: Stories of Animals and Supernatural Beings, page 48:
      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.
    • 1949, Chalmers S. Murray, This Our Land: The Story of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina‎[2], page 233:
      To the typical Negro of the Carolina coast, the night was made fearsome by hordes of spirit beings—the plat-eye, the boo-daddy and boo-hag, the drolls. […] Boo-daddies and boo-hags, were disembodied spirits, released for dread purposes, while drolls were the ghosts of children who had died under mysterious circumstances.
    • 1955, Nell S. Graydon, Tales of Edisto:
      I have heard them sing the songs of their forefathers and tell of Drolls, Boo Daddies, Plat Eyes, and other terrible spirits who came back on this earth at certain times to plague the lives of men.
    • 2013, Lynn Michelsohn, Crab Boy’s Ghost: Gullah Folktales from Murrells Inlet’s Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry‎[3], →ISBN:
      And whenever we heard the droll shrieking from down toward Drunken Jack Island they told us the story of Crab Boy.

  2. ^ “droll”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.

See the verb drolla (“to loiter”).

droll n (genitive singular drolls, no plural)

  1. dawdling, loitering