nidderling

plural nidderlings

1. archaicSomeone who is weak and cowardly.

   As we began to climb the moor, Sir Thomas motioned me with his hand to ride abreast of him, and to make ready my weapons, which I was not loth to do, for I am no nidderling to be afraid of powder.

   1896, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, The Grey Man, page 25

   2 more examples

   There they meet young men who have the true feeling for the sex, and call that man churl and nidderling and pitiful sneak and cur, who would suffer any young woman whom he loves to work if he could order otherwise.

   1889, Walter Besant, To Call Her Mine, page 295

   All at once I realized that I had come as it were into the very hands and mouth of the famous, the notorious, Giant of Cerne Abbas — Baal Durotrigensis, he has been fancifully called — that mysterious figure whose impudent anatomy rouses every sort of surmise and emotion in the archaeologist, the boor, the innocent, the nidderling of towns, the philosopher, and the moralist, each after his kind.

   1935, Frederick Joseph Harvey Darton, English fabric: a study of village life, page 26

comparative more nidderling · superlative most nidderling

1. archaicUnmanly.

   He was starting to get frustrated now, me keeping him from the Long Orbit with this nidderling triviality.

   1992, Eluki Bes Shahar, Darktraders, →ISBN, page 203

   1 more example

   ... and dismissing him with a half sullen, half courteous "Goot nicht," disappeared, before Philip had half got to the end of his catalogue of mental execrations, on the "hog of a German brute, that set no more by the life and limb of a born gentleman, than o' one of his own outlandish, nidderling chaps, that never a Christian soul ud go for to look arter, an' the old Barton ud tumble upon the heads o' the whole kit on em."

   1839, The wizard of Windshaw, page 61