1670–80; < French, Middle French, equivalent to aube (< Provençal alba song about the parting of two lovers at dawn < Vulgar Latin, noun use of feminine of Latin albus white, clear) + -ade -ade1
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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| a gadget; dingus; thingumbob. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
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aubade
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aubade
in the music of the troubadours, the 11th- and 12th-century poet-musicians of southern France, a song of lament for lovers parting at dawn or of a watchman's warning to lovers at dawn. A song of the latter type sometimes takes the form of a dialogue between a watchman and a lover. Some sources consider the alba an early form of an aubade, though unlike the alba an aubade is usually a celebration of the dawn. Examples of albas for which music also survives include Reis glorios by Giraut de Bornelh (c. 1140-c. 1200) and the anonymous Gaite de la tor. The minnesingers, the German counterparts of the troubadours, also used the form, calling it Tagelied ("day song").
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