Word of the Day:
dunce
What It Means
An unintelligent person.
Dunce in Context
“[...] Dunce, / Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, / After a life spent training for the sight!”
Did You Know?
1530, named after John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308). Scotus was ironically a well-known Scottish thinker; his followers, however, opposed the philosophers of the Renaissance, and thus "dunce" was first used to describe someone rejecting new knowledge in 1530; later, any person deemed stupid.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: dunce (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “dunce.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dunce. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
