Word.ws English Dictionary

fallal

fallal noun: a piece of ribbon worn as a streamer.

Noun

fallal (plural fallals)

  1. A piece of ribbon worn as a streamer.
  2. (dated, in plural, often) Any trifling ornament.
    • Wherever she went she had, if not the finest, at any rate the most showy gown in the room; her ornaments were the biggest; her hats, toques, berets, marabouts, and other fallals, always the most conspicuous.1852, William Makepeace Thackeray, Men's Wives, New York: D. Appleton & Company, page 122
    • I should be ashamed to coddle myself as you do! And yet I am old. I need looking after. And there! there! fitting up gowns! fallals!1886, Gustave Flaubert, chapter V, in Eleanor Marx-Aveling, transl., Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners […], London: Vizetelly & Co., […], →OCLC, part III, page 301

Forms of fallal

pluralfallals
alternative formfal-lal

Origin of fallal

Perhaps an alteration of falbala (“furbelow”), from French.

Words formed from fallal

Questions about fallal

What does fallal mean?
Fallal means a piece of ribbon worn as a streamer.
What part of speech is fallal?
Fallal is a noun.
What is the plural of fallal?
The plural of fallal is fallals.

Words near fallal in the dictionary

  1. fallacy
  2. fallacy fallacies
  3. fallacy fallacy
  4. fallacy of composition
  5. Fallagate
  6. fallal
  7. fallaleries
  8. fallalery
  9. fallals
  10. Fallas
  11. Fallases

Source and license

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