Mallemaroking
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The act of carousing on icebound Greenland whaling ships. historical, uncountable
""Just because I had one gin before and a couple of glasses of claret during you thought I'd been mallemaroking.""
Example
More examples""Just because I had one gin before and a couple of glasses of claret during you thought I'd been mallemaroking.""
Etymology
Generally considered to derive from Dutch, although a specific etymon is unclear. Century and some other old dictionaries derive it from a confusion of two similar Dutch words, namely *mallemerok (“foolish woman”) (from malle (“foolish”) + *marok, from French marotte (“jester's sceptre”)) and *mallemok (“sailor of a whaling vessel”), but the first of those words is not attested, and the second is not attested with the claimed meaning (but see mollymawk). Compare mallemolen.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.