Word.ws English Dictionary

troul

troul is the archaic spelling of troll.

Meaning of troll

Verb

troll (third-person singular simple present trolls, present participle trolling, simple past and past participle trolled)

  1. (transitive) To move (something, especially a round object) by, or as if by, rolling; to bowl, to roll, to trundle.
    • Take trustie (to trust to) that thinkest to thee, / That trustily thriftines trowleth to thee.1878, Thomas Tusser, “A Briefe Conclusion, where You may See, ech Word in the Verse, to Begin with a T”, in Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie. […], London: Published for the English Dialect...
  2. (obsolete, transitive) Often followed by in: to cause (something) to flow or roll in like a stream.
  3. (intransitive) To roll; also, to turn round and round; to rotate, to spin, to whirl.
    • Mrs Putler, this is Lady—Lady—these tamn'd Southern names rin out o' my head like a stane trowling down hill— […]1818 July 25, Jedediah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter XIII, in Tales of My Landlord, Second Series, […] (The Heart of Mid-Lothian), volume IV, Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and...
  4. (intransitive) To move or walk at a leisurely pace; to ramble, to saunter, to stroll.
    • Prepoſt'rous foole, thou troul'ſt amiſſe: / Thou err'ſt; That's not the vvay, 'Tis this: / Thy hopes, inſtructed by thine Eye, / Make thee appeare more neare than I; […]1635, Fra[ncis] Quarles, “Canto XI. Mat[thew] VII. XIV.”, in Emblemes, London: […] G[eorge] M[iller] and sold at at Iohn Marriots shope […], →OCLC, book II, stanza 1, page 105
  5. (intransitive, slang, specifically) Chiefly of a man: synonym of cruise (“to stroll about to find a (male) sexual partner”).
  6. (intransitive, obsolete) Followed by in: to flow or roll in like a stream.
    • This little ape gets money by the sack-full, / It trolls upon her.c. 1623 (date written; published 1653), Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, “The Spanish Gipsy”, in A[rthur] H[enry] Bullen, editor, The Works of Thomas Middleton […] (The...

See all 39 meanings of troll

Forms of troul

third-person singular presenttrouls
present participletrouling
past participletrouled
pasttrouled

Questions about troul

What is troul the archaic spelling of?
Troul is the archaic spelling of troll.

Words near troul in the dictionary

  1. Troughtons
  2. troughway
  3. troughways
  4. troughwise
  5. troughy
  6. troul
  7. trouled
  8. trouling
  9. trouls
  10. trounce
  11. trounced

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: troul (page history and authors); troll (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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Cite this entry: “troul.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/troul. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.