scroyle
English edit
Etymology edit
Compare Old French escrouselle (“a kind of vermin”), escrouelles pl (“scrofula”), French écrouelles, from (assumed) Latin scrofulae. See scrofula, and compare cruels.
Noun edit
scroyle (plural scroyles)
- (obsolete) A mean fellow; a wretch.
- 1596, Shakespeare, King John:
- By heaven, these scroyles of Angiers flout you, kings, / And stand securely on their battlements, / As in a theatre, whence they gape and point / At your industrious scenes and acts of death.
Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “scroyle”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)