Today's Word "Droll"
Published in Vocabulary
droll \DROL\ (adjective) - Quaintly amusing, mischievously facetious, exhibiting the qualities of a droll.
"Bertie is the sort of droll creature who enjoys everyone he meets with droll laughter that brightens up any conversation."
This is a qualitative adjective, which means it may be compared: droll, droller, drollest. It has borne three nouns meaning essentially the same thing, "drollery," "drollity," and "drollness," plus the adverb is "drolly." A person who is habitually droll is a droll (the origin of the adjective) and what a droll does is, well, droll around with his friends. This is another word laundered for us by the French. The English noun was borrowed directly from French drole "buffoon." Originally, however, it probably was borrowed by the French from Old Dutch drol "goblin," a close relative of English (via Old Norse) troll "a mischievous dwarf living in a cave." We have now seen several words that circulated back and forth between the Germanic and Romance languages. The process is not a rare one.
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