galliard

English

Alternative forms

• gaillard

Noun

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^[1], London: Jonathan Cape, 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^[2]:

     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

8-point type — see brevier

9-point type — see bourgeois

Adjective

galliard (comparative more galliard, superlative most galliard)

1. (dated) Gay; brisk; active.

See also

• (dance): tordion