Losel

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic term for a worthless, idle person who is good for nothing and wastes their life
2. An old word describing a shiftless good-for-nothing, a wastrel who contributes nothing of value to others
3. A dissolute, useless individual of the kind old writers condemned as a idle wastrel and layabout

Etymology: Middle English "losel" (also "lorel") was a word for a worthless, good-for-nothing person, and its literal sense was almost the reverse of that: it was built from the past participle of "lesen," meaning "to lose." A "losel" was, in effect, someone who had been lost, a wasted or ruined person. The ending "-le" is a suffix that often turned verbs into nouns describing a person who does or is something, which helps explain how a simple past participle could come to name a kind of idle, useless man. The sense then drifted from "lost" toward "wastrel." Over time the word came to describe a lazy or dissolute person rather than one who had simply suffered loss, and that moral judgment is what survived into the later language. The word is now rare, mostly found in historical writing, but its core idea of waste and loss remains visible in its structure.

Synonyms: scoundrel, wastrel, good-for-nothing, rogue

Antonyms: worthy