Find the word definition

Crossword clues for drolleries

drolleries
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Drolleries

Drollery \Droll"er*y\, n.; pl. Drolleries. [F. dr[^o]lerie. See Droll.]

  1. The quality of being droll; sportive tricks; buffoonery; droll stories; comical gestures or manners.

    The rich drollery of ``She Stoops to Conquer.'' -- Macaulay.

  2. Something which serves to raise mirth; as:

    1. A puppet show; also, a puppet. [Obs.]
      --Shak.

    2. A lively or comic picture. [Obs.]

      I bought an excellent drollery, which I afterward parted with to my brother George of Wotton. -- Evelyn.

Wiktionary
drolleries

n. (plural of drollery English)

Wikipedia
Drolleries

Drolleries (or drollery), often called a grotesque, are decorative thumbnail images in the margins of Illuminated manuscripts, most popular from about 1250 through the 15th century, though found earlier and later. The most common types of drollery images appear as mixed creatures, either between different animals, or between animals and human beings, or even between animals and plants or inorganic things. Examples include cocks with human heads, dogs carrying human masks, archers winding out of a fish’s mouth, bird-like dragons with an elephant’s head on the back. Often they have a thematic connection with the subject of the text of the page, and larger miniatures, and they usually form part of a wider scheme of decorated margins, though some are effectively doodles added later.

One manuscript, The Croy Hours, has so many it has become known as The Book of Drolleries.

Another manuscript that contains many drolleries is the Luttrell Psalter, which has hybrid creatures and other monsters on a great deal of the pages.

Usage examples of "drolleries".

I will lay a wager that this good fellow who is with him is one Sancho Panza his squire, whose drolleries none can equal.

I too have heard just what thou hast told me of the valour of the one and the drolleries of the other.

As a child Schaine had found these dinners tedious and she could never understand why Muffin was not allowed to dine in the Great Hall where his fancies and drolleries would certainly have enlivened matters.

This afternoon he took from his satchel a book by Artemus Ward and read it for an hour, chuckling now and again at the late humorist’s drolleries and seemingly unaware of the group in the aisle.

Make me laugh not with jokes, not with journalistic wisecracks, but by oddities of phrase, drolleries of perception, wit that underlay her conversation but did not frolic on the surface of it.