Gadeling

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic term for a close companion or fellow member of a group ; a wandering idler or good-for-nothing person who lives without a settled home or purpose
2. A former word for a comrade or associate ; a vagrant, wastrel or unreliable person who drifts from place to place without work
3. An old-fashioned name for a friend or fellow traveller ; a rootless, idle drifter regarded as worthless by respectable society

Etymology: Gadeling is an Old English word for a companion or fellow, and its story is mostly one of disappearance. It was formed from "gæd" (fellowship, companionship, a community bound together) with the suffix "-ling," which marks a person belonging to or associated with something, the same suffix found in "darling" and "foundling." The root "gæd" also survives in the older sense of "gather," as seen in "gadder" and "gather" itself, so the word originally named someone bound to a group by shared company. Its attested use is almost entirely in Old English texts, where it appears in the sense of a comrade or follower, and it fell out of use in the centuries after the Norman Conquest. Modern English has no direct descendant, so a reader meeting it today is encountering a term that stopped being spoken long before Chaucer's time.