lorel

plural lorels · alternative lorrel

1. A good-for-nothing: a vagabond, waster or losel.

   Just as a simian – be it a monkey or a marmoset, an ape or cercopithecus – may play the scholar or abuse the book, so the lorel can only look upon the Bible or play-act as lord.

   2010, Kent Cartwright, A Companion to Tudor Literature

   2 more examples

   But lurco, I apprehend, signifies only a glutton, which falls very short of our idea of a lorel; and besides I do not believe that the word was ever sufficiently common in Latin to give rise to a derivative in English.

   1810, Alexander Chalmers, The works of the English poets

   I refer to the sinister glossaries appended to sixteenth-century accounts of criminals and vagabonds. "Here I set before the good reader the lewd, lousy language of these loitering lusks and lazy lorels," announces Thomas Harman as he introduces [...]

   1988, Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations