bourd
English
Etymology
From Middle English bourde, from Old French bourde.
Noun
bourd (plural bourds)
- (obsolete) A joke; jesting, banter.
- 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.iii:
- The wisard could no lenger beare her bord,
But brusting forth in laughter, to her sayd;
Glauce, what needs this colourable word […] ?
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Verb
bourd (third-person singular simple present bourds, present participle bourding, simple past and past participle bourded)
- (obsolete) To jest.
- 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Pardoner's Tale”, in The Canterbury Tales, page 138; collected in D. Laing Purves, editor, The Canterbury Tales and Faerie Queene, with Other Poems of Chaucer and Spenser, 1870:
- "Brethren," quoth he, "take keep what I shall say;
My wit is great, though that I bourde and play."
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Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for bourd in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913)
Anagrams
- Burdo
Middle English
Noun
bourd
- Alternative form of bord
Noun
bourd
- Alternative form of bourde