Word.ws English Dictionary

Barnaby

Barnaby noun: a lively and fast-paced dance; (by extension) any quick and uneven movement.

Noun

Barnaby (uncountable)

  1. (archaic) A lively and fast-paced dance; (by extension) any quick and uneven movement.
    • Bounce cry the port-holes, out they fly
      And make the world dance Barnaby.1640-1687, Charles Cotton, in his burlesque of Virgil
    • It was a regular Barnaby dance; I'd never seen anyone move so quickly. Before the culprit bolted out the door into the night,1985, Gregory Sass, Redcoat, page 28

Proper noun

Barnaby

  1. A male given name from Hebrew, from the medieval vernacular form of Barnabas.
    • This day the sun is in his chiefest height
      With Barnaby the Bright.1595, Edmund Spenser, Epithalamium
    • The name Barnaby may strike the reader as out of place in so Celtic a pedigree; but this was an anglicisation of the true name, Brian Oge - - - Now, times are altered, and his anglicised descendants will probably begin to use Brian as a family name again, rejecting Barnaby as less respectable.1848, John O'Donovan, “The Annals of the Four Masters”, in The Dublin University Magazine, volume 31, page 577

Barnaby meaning in Tamil

Barnaby in Tamil

தூயதிருபார்னபஸ்

Examples of Barnaby in a sentence

  • Said to get it to you in a Barnaby dance.1996, Jo Ann Ferguson, Miss Charity's Case, page 182:
  • We were now doing a strange sort of Barnaby dance: shuffling to and fro as I blocked his attempts to set off in pursuit.2009, Julia Golding, The Diamond of Drury Lane, page 434:

Origin of Barnaby

* English surname of Aramaic origin, from בַּר נְבִיָּא (bar nəḇiyyā, literally “prophet’s son”). * Also as an English surname, from Old English Beornwald, from beorn (“young warrior”) + wealdan (“rule”) + Old Norse býr (“farmstead”).

Words formed from Barnaby

Questions about Barnaby

What does Barnaby mean?
Barnaby means a lively and fast-paced dance; (by extension) any quick and uneven movement.
What is Barnaby in Tamil?
Barnaby in Tamil is தூயதிருபார்னபஸ். See Barnaby meaning in Tamil.
How do you use Barnaby in a sentence?
Said to get it to you in a Barnaby dance.
What part of speech is Barnaby?
Barnaby can be a noun or a proper noun.

Words near Barnaby in the dictionary

  1. barn-stars
  2. Barna
  3. Barnabas
  4. Barnabite
  5. Barnabites
  6. Barnaby
  7. Barnaby Bright
  8. Barnack
  9. barnacle
  10. barnacle geese
  11. barnacle goose

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Barnaby (page history and authors); Barnaby (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Barnaby.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/barnaby. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.