galliard

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English

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Alternative forms

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Noun

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English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia
English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

galliard (countable and uncountable, plural galliards)

  1. A lively dance, popular in 16th- and 17th-century Europe.
  2. (music) The triple-time music for this dance.
  3. (dated) A brisk, merry person.
    • 1647, John Cleveland, “The Mixt Assembly”, in The character of a London-diurnall with severall select poems, page 36 1647, keyboarded 1687, scanned:
      Thus every Gibelline hath got his Guelf ;
      But Selden he's a Galliard by himself ;
      And well may be ; there's more Divines in him ,
      Than in all this their Jewish Sanhedrim ;
    • 1828, Sir Walter Scott, The Fair Maid of Perth[1]:
      I will be answerable that this galliard meant but some St. Valentine's jest.
    • 1953, Saul Bellow, chapter 5, in The Adventures of Augie March, New York: Viking Press, →OCLC:
      He was still an old galliard, with white Buffalo Bill vandyke, and he swanked around, still healthy of flesh, in white suits, looking things over with big sex-amused eyes.
  4. (uncountable, Continental printing, dated) An intermediate size of type alternatively equated with brevier (by Didot points) or bourgeois (by Fournier points and by size).

Translations

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Adjective

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galliard (comparative more galliard, superlative most galliard)

  1. (dated) Gay; brisk; active.

See also

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