- Today's Word
Ribald
RIB-uld
Definition
(adjective) Referring to sexual matters in an amusingly coarse or irreverent way; humorously vulgar or indecent.
Example
The ribald humor in the play had the audience howling, even as a few people in the front row pretended to be scandalized.
Word Origin
From Old French ribaud, meaning “a rogue or scoundrel” — derived from the Old High German hriban, meaning “to be wanton.” In medieval France and England, ribaud referred specifically to low-class vagabonds and mercenaries who followed armies and were associated with disreputable behavior. By the time the word settled into English in the 14th century it had narrowed from describing a type of person to describing a type of humor — coarse, irreverent, and cheerfully indecent.
Fun Fact
Ribald humor is far older and more distinguished than its reputation suggests. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the 14th century and considered one of the foundational texts of English literature, is packed with ribald stories — The Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale in particular are so explicitly crude that some editions have historically bowdlerized or omitted them entirely. Shakespeare was equally fond of ribald wordplay, embedding so many bawdy jokes into his plays that entire academic books have been written cataloguing them. The joke, it seems, has always been that ribald humor tends to survive longest precisely because respectable people keep trying to suppress it.