curvetting

Verb

curvet (third-person singular simple present curvets, present participle curvetting or curveting, simple past and past participle curvetted or curveted)

1. (intransitive) Of a horse or, by extension, another animal: to leap about, to frolic.
   • Sometime he trots, as if he told the steps, / With gentle majesty and modest pride; / Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps, / As who should say, 'Lo! thus my strength is tried; / And this I do to captivate the eye / Of the fair breeder that is standing by.'1593, [William Shakespeare], Venus and Adonis, London: […] Richard Field, […], →OCLC, lines [277-282]
2. (transitive) To cause to leap about, dart or jump.
   • […] I could no more travel the same Path, again and again, than I could have Patience to mount a managed Horse, in the Riding-House, and curvet it in the same Spot, for three Hours together.1766, Elizabeth Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances, London: W. Johnston, Volume III, Letter 447, pp. 256-257
3. To fly or swim with darting movements.
   • […] flights of small, low-flying brown doves chased one another to and fro, and bee-eaters, emerald-green, curvetted like slow swallows.1934 October, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Chapter 6”, in Burmese Days, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, →OCLC
4. (figuratively) (of a person) To prance; to caper, frolic.
   • He curvetted back into the living-room […]1943, Sinclair Lewis, chapter V, in Gideon Planish, London: Jonathan Cape, page 44
5. (figuratively) (of an object) To jump, skip, shake.
   • […] you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “Chapter 63”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

See all 7 meanings of curvet

Noun

curveting (plural curvetings)

1. The motion of a horse or other animal that curvets.
   • the curvetings of a horse
2. Caper, frisking, often with a nuance of flirtation. (of a person)
   • One humiliation had succeeded another—the false smiles of the market sellers, the curvetings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirted, the compliments and encouraging words of his father's friends.1916, James Joyce, chapter 2, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man