avauntour

Middle English

Alternative forms

• avaunter

Etymology

Borrowed from Old French avanteur or avantour; equivalent to avaunten +‎ -our.

Noun

avauntour (plural avauntours)

1. one who avaunts or boasts
   • c. 1380s, [Geoffrey Chaucer, William Caxton, editor], The Double Sorow of Troylus to Telle Kyng Pryamus Sone of Troye [...] [Troilus and Criseyde], [Westminster]: Explicit per Caxton, published 1482, →OCLC; republished in [William Thynne], editor, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newlye Printed, […], book III, [London]: […] [Richard Grafton for] Iohn Reynes […], 1542, →OCLC, folio clxxxiiii, verso, column 1, lines 309–315:

     Auauntour and a lyer, al is one / As thus: I poſe a woman graunt me / Her loue, and ſayth that other woll ſhe none / And I am ſworne to holden it ſecre / And after I tel it two or thre / Iwys I am auauntour at the leeſt / And lyer eke, for I breke my beheeſt.

     (please add an English translation of this quotation)

References

• “avauntour”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney and Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1914), “avauntour”, in The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, revised edition, volumes I (A–C), New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.