dunce

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a person regarded as slow to learn or lacking intelligence, often used as an insult

   The impatient teacher wrongly called the struggling pupil a dunce.

Originally Duns or Dunsman, a name for a follower of the medieval Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus. Renaissance humanists and religious reformers mocked his conservative scholastic followers, and by the sixteenth century dunce had shifted from 'Scotist' to 'stupid or slow-learning person.'

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