gaud

plural gauds

1. A cheap showy trinket

   an idle gaud

   c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Nights Dreame”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene i]

   4 more examples

   But I am heart-set on you, and to win you there is not a precious stone I would leave unturned. Conceive a parure all of white stones—diamonds, white sapphires, white topazes, tourmalines. Another, of rubies and amethysts, set in gold filigree. Rings that once were poison-combs on Florentine fingers. Red roses for your hair—every petal a hollowed ruby. Amulets and ape-buckles, zones and fillets. Aye! know that you would be weeping for wonder before you had seen a tithe of these gauds.

   1911 October 26, Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, or, An Oxford Love Story, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: John Lane Company, published 1912, →OCLC

   A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisp locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train beside the desert, we should make to do our general housework forever, through the right of lawful purchase.

   1912, The World's Wit and Humor, page 176

   Dalmeny lent me red tabs, Evans his brass hat; so that I had the gauds of my appointment in the ceremony of the Jaffa gate, which for me was the supreme moment of the war.

   1922, T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (published 1926)

   Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer.

   1922, James Joyce, Ulysses, Part I, episode 1

2. obsoletetrick; jest; sport
3. obsoletedeceit; fraud; artifice

present singular third person gauds · participle present gauding · participle past gauded · past gauded

1. obsoleteTo bedeck gaudily; to decorate with gauds or showy trinkets or colours; to paint.

   Nicely gauded cheeks.

   c. 1608–1609 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Coriolanus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene i]

present singular third person gauds · participle present gauding · participle past gauded · past gauded

1. To sport or keep festival.

   gauding with his familiars

   1579, Thomas North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes

1. alternativeAlternative form of Gaur (“ancient Bengali city”).