toady

• Rhymes: -əʊdi

Shortened from toadeater, +‎ -y.

toady (plural toadies)

1. A sycophant who flatters others to gain personal advantage or an obsequious lackey or minion
   • 1929, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, Penguin Books, paperback edition, page 61

     But how could she have helped herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet.

   • 1912, Stratemeyer Syndicate, chapter 1, in Baseball Joe on the School Nine:

     "Go on, Hiram, show 'em what you can do," urged Luke Fodick, who was a sort of toady to Hiram Shell, the school bully, if ever there was one.

   • Charles Dickens

     Before I had been standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs.

   • Walter Scott, The Surgeon's Daughter, 1827

     “But who is she, can you tell me?” “Some fair-skinned speculation of old Montreville's, I suppose, that she has got either to toady herself, or take in some of her black friends with.—Is it possible you have never heard of old Mother Montreville?”

   • John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, Volume 1, 1901, p569

     ...the appearance of only three coaches, each drawn by four horses, was rather trying for poor Lady Scott. They contained Mrs Coutts — her future lord the Duke of St Albans — one of his Grace's sisters — a dame de compagnie (vulgarly styled a Toady)

2. (archaic) A coarse, rustic woman.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Sir Walter Scott to this entry?)

• See also Thesaurus:sycophant

• toadyish

toady (third-person singular simple present toadies, present participle toadying, simple past and past participle toadied)

1. (intransitive, construed with to) To behave like a toady (to someone).

toad +‎ -y

toady (comparative more toady, superlative most toady)

1. toadlike
   • 1874, Transactions (issue 19, page 141)

     The bath is of greatest advantage in these chronic cases, with an earthy complexion and toady skin, if I am allowed thus to express its appearance.

• to-day, today