Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Chiefly Southern US A mudhole; a mire.
  • noun The loblolly pine.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A loutish or foolish person.
  • noun Nautical: Water-gruel or spoon-meat.
  • noun Medicines collectively. Also written, erroneously, loplolly.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Gruel; porridge; -- so called among seamen.
  • noun (Bot.) an elegant white-flowered evergreen shrub or small tree, of the genus Gordonia (Gordonia Lasianthus), growing in the maritime parts of the Southern United States. Its bark is sometimes used in tanning. Also, a similar West Indian tree (Laplacea hæmatoxylon).
  • noun a surgeon's attendant on shipboard.
  • noun (Bot.) a kind of pitch pine found from Delaware southward along the coast; old field pine (Pinus Tæda). Also, Pinus Bahamensis, of the West Indies.
  • noun (Bot.) a name of several West Indian trees, having more or less leathery foliage, but alike in no other respect; as Pisonia subcordata, Cordia alba, and Cupania glabra.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun dialect, nautical Gruel.
  • noun US, southern A mudhole.
  • noun A bumpkin or lout.
  • noun Loblolly pine, Pinus taeda.
  • noun Loblolly bay (plant).
  • verb Behave in a loutish manner.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun thick gruel

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Perhaps dialectal lob, to bubble + lolly, broth.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Yorkshire dialect lob ("boil", literally "bubbling up") + dialect lolly ("broth").

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Examples

Comments

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  • Loblolly is a pine species. "Thick gruel"? Puh-leeze!

    January 8, 2008

  • WeirdNet strikes again.

    January 8, 2008

  • Eeyew. It makes me think of gruel with long pine needles in it!

    January 8, 2008

  • "Lots of folk live on their wits:

    Lecturers, lispers,

    Losers, loblolly-men, louts-

    They don't end as paupers"

    Larkin, Toads

    January 8, 2008

  • C'mon, gruel's cool. Have some more!

    January 8, 2008

  • There are 2,380 hits for "loblolly gruel", so I think it is valid.

    January 9, 2008

  • I've only ever seen this word meaning a kind of pine tree, except in this set of O'Brian novels, in which the word loblolly-boy appears so frequently that I didn't even think of listing it until the 12th novel, or whichever the hell one that I'm on. Anyway, usage note's on loblolly-boy.

    March 7, 2008

  • An odd mixture of spoon-meat. --an old provincial term from Exmoor England. Grose's 1787 A Provincial Glossary lists this definition and mentions its application to water-gruel and loblolly-boy.

    May 6, 2011

  • Blecch.

    May 6, 2011

  • Nautical!

    October 8, 2011

  • C'mon wordnik. loblolly-- a stupid or foolish person

    July 27, 2012

  • The only definition from "GNU Webster's 1913" is: "n. Gruel; porridge; -- so called among seamen."

    July 27, 2012

  • I looked this up on encountering it in "All the King's Men" in a sense that didn't fit my understanding of loblolly as a kind of pine tree, and I found out that a loblolly pine is a species that grows in a loblolly. I found this delightfully disorienting, and "loblolly" is now my word.

    August 16, 2024