drollery

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We kept them for one Sunday, and then got rid of them in disgust Well, one Saturday afternoon, Only-One-Eye brought us a little thin, lively, jumping, chattering girl, full of drollery, of that drollery which is the substitute for wit among the youthful male and female workpeople who have developed in the streets of Paris.

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Definitions (11)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (4)

  1. noun A comical or whimsical quality.
  2. noun A comical or whimsical way of acting, talking, or behaving.
  3. noun The act of joking; clowning.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (4)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (50)

  • Its phantasy is found in gaiety and drollery, and it has called up the Nuremberg of the Middle Ages, with its guilds, its poet- artisans, its pedants, its cavaliers, to draw forth the most fresh laughter in the midst of the highest, the most ideal, poetry. —  Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End"
  • This drollery is customary here at Whitsuntide The second excursion is thus described July, 1831.—The day before yesterday honest Wurfel called on me; Czapek, Kumelski. —  Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician, Volume 1
  • Paul was irresistible in his drollery, and whether it was mimicry or original humour, you could not but revel in its quaint conceits. —  The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton)
  • If caricature is drollery, and not humour, as Carlyle says it is, Mr. May is above all things a humorist, and not at all a droll. —  The History of "Punch"
  • Whereupon the black eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and apparently she began to sing, keeping time with her hands and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time; and finally, turning a somersault or two, she came suddenly down on the carpet, and stood with her hands folded, and a most sanctimonious expression of meekness and solemnity over her face, only broken by the cunning glances which she shot askance from the corners of her eyes. —  Tales of Fantasy and Fact
 

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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. from Old French drolerie, draulerie, waggery, a merry prank, an antic figure or mask set on a scutcheon or coat of arms, modern F. drólerie, waggery, from drolle, dróle, n. See droll, n.
 

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/ˈdroʊləri/
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