Dictionary

lorel en · NOUN

Etymology

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

Meanings

1. A good-for-nothing: a vagabond, waster or losel.
   • 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. 2010, Kent Cartwright, A Companion to Tudor Literature:
   • 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. 1810, Alexander Chalmers, The works of the English poets:
   • 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 [...] 1988, Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations:

Forms