lorel

English

Alternative forms

• lorrel

Etymology

From Middle English lorel, losel, equivalent to lose +‎ -le.

Noun

lorel (plural lorels)

1. A good-for-nothing fellow; a vagabond; losel.
   • 1810, Alexander Chalmers, The works of the English poets:

     But lurco, I apprehend, signifies only a glutton, which falls very short of our idea of a lorel; and besides I do not believe that the word was ever sufficiently common in Latin to give rise to a derivative in English.

   • 1988, Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations:

     I refer to the sinister glossaries appended to sixteenth-century accounts of criminals and vagabonds. "Here I set before the good reader the lewd, lousy language of these loitering lusks and lazy lorels," announces Thomas Harman as he introduces [...]

   • 2010, Kent Cartwright, A Companion to Tudor Literature:

     Just as a simian – be it a monkey or a marmoset, an ape or cercopithecus – may play the scholar or abuse the book, so the lorel can only look upon the Bible or play-act as lord.

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 The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.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 “lorel”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Anagrams

• LOLer, Roell, Rolle, rello