Word.ws English Dictionary

capriole

capriole noun: a leap that a horse makes with all fours, upwards only, without advancing, but with a kick or jerk of the hind legs when at the height of the leap.

capriole: a leap that a horse makes with all fours, upwards only, without advancing, but with a kick or jerk...
Image: Alain Laurioux ( CDDENE ), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

capriole (plural caprioles)

  1. A leap that a horse makes with all fours, upwards only, without advancing, but with a kick or jerk of the hind legs when at the height of the leap.
  2. A leap or caper, as in dancing.
    • With lofty turns and caprioles.1595, John Davies, Orchestra
    • When Dandy Dinmont, after executing two or three caprioles, and cutting the Highland-fling, by way of ridicule of his wife's anxiety, at last deigned to sit down, and commit his round, black, shaggy bullet of a head to her inspection.1815 February 24, [Walter Scott], chapter 3, in Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. […], volume II, Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and...

Verb

capriole (third-person singular simple present caprioles, present participle caprioling, simple past and past participle caprioled)

  1. (intransitive) To leap; to caper.
  2. (transitive) To cause (one's mounted horse) to perform a capriole.
    • Brawny fighters, all cased in buff and iron, their hearts too sheathed in oak and triple brass, caprioled their huge war-horses, shook their death-doing spears; and went forth in the most determined manner, nothing doubting.1838, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott

Forms of capriole

Noun
pluralcaprioles
Verb
third-person singular presentcaprioles
present participlecaprioling
past participlecaprioled
pastcaprioled

Origin of capriole

Borrowed from French capriole, from Italian capriola.

Questions about capriole

What does capriole mean?
Capriole means a leap that a horse makes with all fours, upwards only, without advancing, but with a kick or jerk of the hind legs when at the height of the leap.
What part of speech is capriole?
Capriole can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of capriole?
The plural of capriole is caprioles.

Words near capriole in the dictionary

  1. caprines
  2. caprinic
  3. caprinid
  4. caprinids
  5. Caprio
  6. capriole
  7. caprioled
  8. caprioles
  9. caprioling
  10. capriomycin
  11. Caprios

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: capriole (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: “capriole.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/capriole. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.