Word.ws English Dictionary

lorel

lorel noun: a good-for-nothing: a vagabond, waster or losel.

Noun

lorel (plural lorels)

  1. A good-for-nothing: a vagabond, waster or losel.
    • But lurco, I apprehend, signifies only a glutton, which falls very short of our idea of a lorel; and besides I do not believe that the word was ever sufficiently common in Latin to give rise to a derivative in English.1810, Alexander Chalmers, The works of the English poets
    • I refer to the sinister glossaries appended to sixteenth-century accounts of criminals and vagabonds. "Here I set before the good reader the lewd, lousy language of these loitering lusks and lazy lorels," announces Thomas Harman as he introduces [...]1988, Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations

Forms of lorel

plurallorels
alternative formlorrel

Origin of lorel

From Middle English lorel, losel, equivalent to lose + -le.

Questions about lorel

What does lorel mean?
Lorel means a good-for-nothing: a vagabond, waster or losel.
What part of speech is lorel?
Lorel is a noun.
What is the plural of lorel?
The plural of lorel is lorels.

Words near lorel in the dictionary

  1. Lorees
  2. lorefather
  3. lorefathers
  4. Lorega
  5. Lorega San Miguel
  6. lorel
  7. Lorelai
  8. lorelei
  9. loreleis
  10. loreless
  11. lorell

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lorel (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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