galliard

• gaillard

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

galliard (countable and uncountable, plural galliards)

1. A lively dance, popular in 16th- and 17th-century Europe.
   • 1922, E[ric] R[ücker] Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance, London: Jonathan Cape […], →OCLC, page 33:

     […] sweet to us it is to behold delightful dancing, be it the stately splendour of the Pavane which progresseth as large clouds at sun-down that pass by in splendour; or the graceful Allemande; or the Fandango, which goeth by degrees from languorous beauty to the swiftness and passion of Bacchanals dancing on the high lawns under a summer moon that hangeth in the pine trees; or the joyous maze of the Galliard; or the Gigue, dear to the Foliots.

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).

galliard (comparative more galliard, superlative most galliard)

1. (dated) Gay; brisk; active.

• (dance): tordion