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  1. agelast love

Definitions

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. One who never laughs.

Wiktionary

  1. n. rare one who never laughs (especially at jokes); a mirthless person

Etymologies

  1. Derived from the Greek agelastos ("not laughing"), itself stemming from gelaein ("to laugh"). (Wiktionary)

Examples

  • “One minute you're learning that Sir Issac Newton chuckled only once in his life (scoffing at Euclidean geometry) and that the term for such people who don't laugh is 'agelast'; the next that the apparently nonsensical elephant jokes that were popular in the Sixties are believed to be racist in origin; the next how Bertrand Russell put down a heckler during one of his lectures on logic.”

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  • “For example, an agelast is someone who never laughs.”

    Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph

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antonyms (2)

Words with the opposite meaning

  1. cachinnator
  1. hypergelast

tags (4)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. who knew
  1. trait
  1. word-of-the-day
  1. wotd

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Lists

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Comments

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  • milosrdenstvi I was your agelast June, I think. Oct 1, 2010

  • Carla Cruz Someone who never laughs. Sep 30, 2010

  • AllisonSylvester "sam was an agelast, always seen with a serious face, and never cracked a laugh"
    http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/unuwords.htm Sep 30, 2010

  • knitandpurl "Such (meta)satire not only labels Osborne a carnival agelast or unlaughing lenten hypocrite (Bakhtin 212-13) like Carroll's Queen of Hearts, but also suggests the dystopian undercurrents of carnival that post-Bakhtinians like Michael André Bernstein stress: 'when the tropes of Saturnalian reversal of all values spill over into daily life, they usually do so with a savagery that is the grim underside of their exuberant affirmations' (6)."
    Mark M. Hennelly (2009). ALICE'S ADVENTURES AT THE CARNIVAL. Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 , pp 103-128 (p 106)
    doi:10.1017/S106015030909007X
    Feb 11, 2009

  • jmjarmstrong JM had a good old laugh with his mate the agelast Feb 6, 2009

  • qroqqa This word 'ultimately' and the infinitive ending on gelaein hide rather than illuminate the etymology. The root is gel- "laugh", with thematic ending -a- (this puts it into a subclass of verbs and shows up in many derivatives). Then gel-a-st- is an adjectival stem, showing up in gelast-os, -ê, -on "laughable" and the noun gelastês (feminine gelastria) "laugher, sneerer". With the negative prefix it is the adjective agelast-os, -ê, -on "unlaughing". It is this that Rabelais borrowed, dropping the ending as usual to fit it into French. Jul 31, 2008

  • sakhalinskii One who has imbibed water from the fountain of youth. Jul 31, 2008

  • missanthropist Mmm... oddly akin unto aghast. Jul 31, 2008

  • sarra Troopie, your source is showing! May 7, 2008

  • troopie From Greek agelastos (not laughing), ultimately from gelaein (to laugh). May 7, 2008

  • sarra Gr. agelastos, not laughing; ultimately from gelaein, to laugh. Coined by the French Renaissance writer Rabelais, or so the source quoted in the OED suggests. Jul 2, 2007

  • seanahan Anyone have any sort of etymology for this? Feb 23, 2007

  • reesetee One who never laughs. Feb 23, 2007

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‘agelast’ has been looked up 6791 times, loved by 23 people, added to 59 lists, commented on 13 times, and has a Scrabble score of 8.