Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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| a gadget; dingus; thingumbob. |
| a fool or simpleton; ninny. |
| glee (ɡliː) | |
| —n | |
| 1. | great merriment or delight, often caused by someone else's misfortune |
| 2. | Compare madrigal a type of song originating in 18th-century England, sung by three or more unaccompanied voices |
| [Old English gléo; related to Old Norse glӯ] | |
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glee
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glee
(from Old English gleo: "music" or "entertainment," used in this sense in Beowulf), vocal composition for three or more unaccompanied solo male voices, including a countertenor. It consists of several short sections of contrasting character or mood, each ending in a full close, or cadence, and its text is often concerned with eating and drinking. In style it is homophonic-i.e., based on chords rather than on interwoven melodies. Although the first composer to use the term for a musical work was John Playford (1652), the glee flourished from about 1740 to about 1830. By the late 18th century, glees were also composed for mixed voices (male and female). The term is also loosely applied to various vocal compositions of the 17th-19th centuries that do not conform to these characteristics-e.g., the instrumentally accompanied part-songs by Henry Bishop
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