Word.ws English Dictionary

mallemaroking

/ˌmæləməˈɹoʊkɪŋ/

mallemaroking noun: the act of carousing on icebound Greenland whaling ships.

Noun

mallemaroking (uncountable)

  1. (historical) The act of carousing on icebound Greenland whaling ships.
    • "Just because I had one gin before and a couple of glasses of claret during you thought I'd been mallemaroking."1958, “Punch”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name), volume 235, page 319
    • […] they were willing to endure so much physical hardship out of loyalty to Emperor Franz Joseph. Indeed, such is their sense of duty that they even indulge in some muted mallemaroking to celebrate the Emperor's birthday.2006, Katrin Maria Kohl, Ritchie Robertson, A History of Austrian Literature 1918-2000, page 243

Origin of mallemaroking

Generally considered to derive from Dutch, although a specific etymon is unclear. Century and some other old dictionaries derive it from a confusion of two similar Dutch words, namely *mallemerok (“foolish woman”) (from malle (“foolish”) + *marok, from French marotte (“jester's sceptre”)) and *mallemok (“sailor of a whaling vessel”), but the first of those words is not attested, and the second is not attested with the claimed meaning (but see mollymawk). Compare mallemolen.

Questions about mallemaroking

What does mallemaroking mean?
Mallemaroking means the act of carousing on icebound Greenland whaling ships.
What part of speech is mallemaroking?
Mallemaroking is a noun.
How do you pronounce mallemaroking?
Mallemaroking is pronounced /ˌmæləməˈɹoʊkɪŋ/.

Words near mallemaroking in the dictionary

  1. mallei
  2. malleid
  3. malleids
  4. malleiform
  5. mallein
  6. mallemaroking
  7. mallemocke
  8. mallemoke
  9. mallemuck
  10. mallemucks
  11. Mallen

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mallemaroking (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-mallemaroking.ogg.

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