Adjective: dastard
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more dastard |
| Superlative | most dastard |
Sample Sentences
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1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book III, Canto One, Stanza 22, in The Faerie Queene, Books Three and Four, edited by Dorothy Stephens, Hackett, 2006, p. 13,
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Like dastard Curres, that having at a bay
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The salvage beast embost in wearie chace,
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Dare not adventure on the stubborne pray,
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Ne byte before, but rome from place to place,
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To get a snatch, when turned is his face.
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Now dragg'd once more beyond the western main,
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To groan beneath some dastard planter’s chain;
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Where my poor countrymen in bondage wait
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The long enfranchisement of ling’ring fate: [1789, Olaudah Equiano, chapter 5, in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano:]
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Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times. ‘Happiness our being’s end and aim’ is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world. [1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “ch. IV, Happy”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, book III (The Modern Worker):]
Adjectives inflected like dastard
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Middle English dastard (“a dullard”), most likely formed from *dast, a base derived from Old Norse dæstr (“exhausted, breathless”) + -ard. Compare Icelandic dasaður (“exhausted”), dialectal Swedish däst (“weary”), Middle Dutch dasaert, daasaardt (“a fool”), English dazed (“stupefied”). See: Swedish Adjectives '
däst', English Adjectives '
dazed'.