Word.ws English Dictionary

rois fainéants

rois fainéants is the plural of roi fainéant.

Meaning of roi fainéant

Noun

roi fainéant (plural rois fainéants)

  1. (historical) Any of the later French kings of the Merovingian dynasty, considered to have played a merely ceremonial role.
    • Whether it be some Visigothic chieftain raised on a shield above the shoulders of his shouting warriors, some Roi Fainéant of the Merovingian race, a listless, pallid, long-haired kingling, dragged languidly through the streets in a painted wagon by sleek oxen, […] it seems clear to me that we must...1860, George Augustus Sala, Lady Chesterfield's Letters to her Daughter
  2. A leader with only nominal power.
    • He is a King Do-Nothing, a Roi Fainéant, who shirks and evades all the responsibilities of his position […]1898, Henry Harland, Comedies and Errors

Questions about rois fainéants

What is rois fainéants the plural of?
Rois fainéants is the plural of roi fainéant.

Words near rois fainéants in the dictionary

  1. roinish
  2. roins
  3. ROIP
  4. Roiphe
  5. ROIs
  6. rois fainéants
  7. Roisin
  8. roist
  9. roisted
  10. roister
  11. roister-doister

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rois fainéants (page history and authors); roi fainéant (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “rois fainéants.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rois_fain%C3%A9ants. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.