Word.ws English Dictionary

thingman

thingman noun: one of several men gathered at a thing, for example to settle a dispute over a debt.

Noun

thingman (plural thingmen)

  1. (historical, plural-normally) One of several men gathered at a thing, for example to settle a dispute over a debt.
    • Now if the debtor pleads that "I do not know the law but I will comply with whatever the thingmen think lawful," he [the creditor] must summon him before the thing after five nights, at the shortest, and five times five at the longest, if he knows when the thing is to meet; […] it is then the duty...2008, The Earliest Norwegian Laws: Being the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law, translated from Old Norwegian by Laurence Marcellus Larson, page 63
  2. (historical, plural-normally) (One of several) men serving as the army, particularly the mercenary army, (of a specific ruler).
    • A thingman and chieftain owed each other duties of support. […] The ideal is well stated by Eyjolf to his own thingmen as he requests their support in his struggles against the Ljosvetning kin group […]1989, Law and literature in medieval Iceland: Ljósvetninga saga and Valla-Ljóts saga, Theodore Murdock Andersson, William Ian Miller, page 8

Forms of thingman

pluralthingmen

Origin of thingman

Calque of Old Norse thingman, which is þing (“thing”) + maðr (“man”), or else a back-formation from "thingmen", which was borrowed morpheme for morpheme from þingmenn (“thingmen”).

Questions about thingman

What does thingman mean?
Thingman means one of several men gathered at a thing, for example to settle a dispute over a debt.
What part of speech is thingman?
Thingman is a noun.
What is the plural of thingman?
The plural of thingman is thingmen.

Words near thingman in the dictionary

  1. thingliness
  2. thingly
  3. thingmabob
  4. thingmabobs
  5. thingmajig
  6. thingman
  7. thingmen
  8. thingmies
  9. thingmy
  10. Thingnam
  11. thingness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thingman (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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