Word.ws English Dictionary

roulroul

roulroul noun: a gamebird in the pheasant family, the crested partridge (Rollulus rouloul).

roulroul: a gamebird in the pheasant family, the crested partridge (Rollulus rouloul)
Image: Shane K, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

roulroul (plural roulrouls)

  1. A gamebird in the pheasant family, the crested partridge (Rollulus rouloul).

Forms of roulroul

pluralroulrouls
alternative formroul roul
alternative formroul-roul

Origin of roulroul

From the misspelling "roulroul" in George Robert Gray's 1844 publication List of the Specimens of Birds in the Collection of the British Museum, from a misinterpretation of "Le Rouloul de Malacca" as an instance of reduplication in Giovanni Antonio Scopoli's Deliciae florae et faunae Insubricae, seu novae, aut minus cognitae species plantarum et animalium quas in Insubria Austriaca, tam spontaneas quam exoticas vidit, descripsit, from "Rouloul de Malacca" (plate 100) and its description (pages 174 and 175) in Pierre Sonnerat's 1872 Voyage aux Indes Orientales et a la Chine, fait par ordre du roi, depuis 1774 jusqu'en 1781, from the Malayic onomatopoeic rendition of one of the bird's calls.

Questions about roulroul

What does roulroul mean?
Roulroul means a gamebird in the pheasant family, the crested partridge (Rollulus rouloul).
What part of speech is roulroul?
Roulroul is a noun.
What is the plural of roulroul?
The plural of roulroul is roulrouls.

Words near roulroul in the dictionary

  1. rouleur
  2. rouleurs
  3. Roulhac
  4. Roulhacs
  5. rouling
  6. roulroul
  7. roulrouls
  8. Roulston
  9. Roulstone
  10. rouly-pouly
  11. roum

Source and license

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