galliard

• gaillard

galliard (countable and uncountable, plural galliards)

1. A lively dance, popular in 16th- and 17th-century Europe
2. (music) The triple-time music for this dance
3. (dated) A brisk, merry person.
   • John Cleveland, "The Mixt Assembly" (1647) The character of a London-diurnall with severall select poems, page 36 1647, keyboarded 1687, scanned: “Thus every Gibelline hath got his Guelf ;
     But Selden he's a Galliard by himself ;
     And well may be ; there's more Divines in him ,
     Than in all this their Jewish Sanhedrim ;”
   • 1828, Sir Walter Scott, The Fair Maid of Perth‎:

     I will be answerable that this galliard meant but some St. Valentine's jest.

   • 1953, Saul Bellow, chapter 5, in The Adventures of Augie March:

     He was still an old galliard, with white Buffalo Bill vandyke, and he swanked around, still healthy of flesh, in white suits, looking things over with big sex-amused eyes.

4. (uncountable, Continental printing, dated) An intermediate size of type alternatively equated with brevier (by Didot points) or bourgeois (by Fournier points and by size).

galliard (comparative more galliard, superlative most galliard)

1. gay; brisk; active

• (dance): tordion