Doddard
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A frail old man.
"You are too old and too exacting to be satisfied with a blank page. You would certainly prefer one upon which life has written something. It is more interesting. Young girls are only for youths and for certain brainless doddards."
- 2 A moribund or decayed tree. rare
"[…] / Another ſhakes the Bed; diſſolving there, / Till knots upon his Gouty Joints appear, / And Chalk is in his crippled Fingers found; / Rots like a Doddard Oke, and piecemeal falls to the ground."
Example
More examples"You are too old and too exacting to be satisfied with a blank page. You would certainly prefer one upon which life has written something. It is more interesting. Young girls are only for youths and for certain brainless doddards."
Etymology
Possibly from dodder (“to shake or tremble as one moves, especially as of old age”) + -ard. The Scottish National Dictionary, a Scots dictionary, defining doddard as “A foolish old man, a dotard”, and providing an 1823 quotation, gives the etymology as either a variant of dotard, comparing Early Modern English dodart, or perhaps related to doddered, with spelling influenced by dotard.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.