English

Alternative forms

• gaillard

Noun

galliard ‎(countable and uncountable, plural galliards)

1. A lively dance, popular in 16th- and 17th-century Europe
2. (music) The triple-time music for this dance
3. (dated) A brisk, merry person.
   • John Cleveland, "The Mixt Assembly" (1647) The character of a London-diurnall with severall select poems, page 36 1647, keyboarded 1687, scanned: “Thus every Gibelline hath got his Guelf ;
     But Selden he's a Galliard by himself ;
     And well may be ; there's more Divines in him ,
     Than in all this their Jewish Sanhedrim ;”
   • 1828, Sir Walter Scott, The Fair Maid of Perth:

     I will be answerable that this galliard meant but some St. Valentine's jest.

   • 1953, Saul Bellow, chapter 5, in The Adventures of Augie March:

     He was still an old galliard, with white Buffalo Bill vandyke, and he swanked around, still healthy of flesh, in white suits, looking things over with big sex-amused eyes.

4. (uncountable, Continental printing, dated) An intermediate size of type alternatively equated with brevier (by Didot points) or bourgeois (by Fournier points and by size).

Translations

See also

• (dance): tordion

Adjective

galliard ‎(comparative more galliard, superlative most galliard)

1. gay; brisk; active