argal

Meanings

1. 1
   adv

   archaic or humorous: therefore; thus

   Argal, the critic declared, a painting without style scarcely existed at all.

2. 2
   noun

   a rare variant of argali, the large wild sheep of Central Asia

   The naturalist watched an argal moving across the high plateau.

3. 3
   noun

   historical: crude potassium bitartrate deposited inside a wine cask

   Workers scraped the argal from the emptied wine barrels.

The adverb is a comic corruption of Latin ergo, 'therefore,' famously used by the gravedigger in Shakespeare's Hamlet. The sheep noun is a shortening of argali, from Mongolian. The wine-cask noun is a variant of argol, from Middle English argul through Anglo-French argoil; its deeper origin is uncertain.

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