![]() ![]() The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. It’s something of a solecism – technically, one lies about rather than lays about – but it’s become one of the most popular nouns for a lazy person, and seems like a good word to conclude our list of the best synonyms for laziness and a lazy person. ![]() Used to denote an idle loafer, this word is first recorded in 1932 (according to the OED). Defined as ‘resembling one who is given to crying “Lackaday!” full of vapid feeling or sentiment affectedly languishing’ ( OED).ĭating from 1883, this is one of the best synonyms for ‘lazy’ that denotes someone who knows they should be at work, but … This word first appears in Laurence Sterne’s 1768 novel Tristram Shandy, although whether Sterne coined this handy synonym for ‘weak-willed and indolent’, it’s difficult to know for sure. Of surprisingly ancient vintage: the OED records this word in colloquial use from 1593. Of uncertain etymology.Īlthough now rare, this word, referring to a servant or employee who is hard-working or obedient only when observed by their employer, dates from the sixteenth century, and was used in one of the Protestant martyr Hugh Latimer’s sermons.Ī more recent coinage, this twentieth-century word denotes the overwhelming desire to stay in bed. However, the word – rare though it is – is slightly more common in the phrase ‘doing quisby’, which was old slang for idling or not working. The word ‘quisby’ means ‘an idle fellow’, and so is a glorious synonym for a lazy person, for someone who idles. It is defined by one nineteenth-century dictionary thus: ‘To be apparently diligent and yet doing nothing, to be so about trifles.’ Perhaps it’s due a revival?Īppearing in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, where Prince Hal uses it to describe – surprise, surprise – Falstaff (‘This sanguine coward, this bed-presser’), this handy noun for a lazy person was defined by Samuel Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary as ‘a heavy lazy fellow’. Etymologically, it literally means ‘not busy’ (from the Latin). This is a rare and obsolete term, a noun meaning ‘sluggishness’ or ‘sloth’. ![]() It was also used as another term for what we’d now call a stroke Daniel Defoe’s cause of death in 1731 was listed as ‘a lethargy’. ‘Lethargy’ was originally a medical term denoting ‘a disorder characterized by morbid drowsiness or prolonged and unnatural sleep’ ( OED). ![]()
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