Lord of Misrule
- noun
- Archaic
:
Señor del Desorden
- Every year, the villagers chose a new Lord of Misrule to oversee the Christmas festival filled with games and feasts.
Examples
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At Jamestown Settlement, holiday film and guided tours—with periodic appearances by the "Lord of Misrule"—compare and contrast English Christmas customs of the period with how the season may have been observed in the difficult early years of the Jamestown colony.
Blog text (17) -
During the festive season, the community appointed a Lord of Misrule to lead the celebrations and ensure everyone enjoyed the merry chaos.
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The Lord of Misrule danced through the streets, encouraging revelers to join in the laughter and festivities.
Synonyms
1
5.3
A person who joins lively noisy celebrations
A person who celebrates loudly and behaves wildly
Surface Forms
Morphology
A learner who knows 'lord' and 'misrule' can infer someone who is 'in charge of misrule', so the general idea of a person presiding over disorder is derivable. However, the phrase names a specific historical/cultural role (a festive master of revels at Christmas) and the nuance differs from the common sense of 'misrule' as corrupt governance, so the exact meaning is not fully predictable without exposure.
Etymology
Lord of Misrule comes from an old English Christmas tradition. In that tradition someone was chosen as a mock lord to encourage misrule and lead noisy games, so the name came to mean 'a person who presides over festive disorder'.