bourd

English

Etymology

From Middle English bourde, from Old French bourde.

Noun

bourd (plural bourds)

1. (obsolete) A joke; jesting, banter.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.iii:

     The wisard could no lenger beare her bord,
     But brusting forth in laughter, to her sayd;
     Glauce, what needs this colourable word […] ?

Verb

bourd (third-person singular simple present bourds, present participle bourding, simple past and past participle bourded)

1. (obsolete) To jest.
   • 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Pardoner's Tale”, in The Canterbury Tales‎^[1], page 138; collected in D. Laing Purves, editor, The Canterbury Tales and Faerie Queene, with Other Poems of Chaucer and Spenser, 1870:

     "Brethren," quoth he, "take keep what I shall say;
     My wit is great, though that I bourde and play."

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “bourd”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Anagrams

• Burdo

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Middle English

Etymology 1

Inherited from Old English bord.

Noun

bourd

1. Alternative form of bord

Etymology 2

Borrowed from Old French bourde.

Noun

bourd

1. Alternative form of bourde