Dictionary

driveller en · NOUN

Etymology

From drivel + -er.

Meanings

1. Someone who drivels.
   • "All able men," adds Macaulay, "ridiculed him as a dunce, a driveller, a child who never knew his own mind an hour together; and yet he overreached them all." 1874, John Lord, A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon:
   • [416:6] What intelligent Christian can believe that a minister, instructed by Paul or Peter, and filling one of the most important stations in the apostolic Church, was verily such an ignorant driveller? 1859, W.D. [William Dool] Killen, The Ancient Church:
   • Think of the men whom I may call book-eaters! Dr. Parr was a driveller; Porson was a sort of learned pig who routed up truffles in the classic garden; poor Buckle became, through stress of books, a shallow thinker; Mezzofanti, with his sixty-four languages and dialects, was perilously like a fool; and more than one modern professor may be counted as nothing else but a vain, over-educated boor. 1893, James Runciman, Side Lights:
   • And, to leave this miserable driveller without a pretence for his cowardice, the Prince asks it as a personal favour of me, forsooth, not to press my just and reasonable request at this moment. 1893, Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete:
   • I can smash Shakspeare; I can prove Milton to be a driveller, or the contrary: but, for preference, take, as I have said, the abusive line. 1841, Various, Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841:
2. (UK) The pole used to launch the beer-soaked cloth in the game of dwile flonking.
   • Well away from the centre of sanity is dwile flonking. In this game, or possibly sport, a circle of girters dances round a member of the opposing team who revolves in the opposite direction holding a driveller. 1976, Richard Boston, Beer and skittles, page 156:

Forms