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.

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Dunce comes from the name of the medieval Scottish scholar John Duns Scotus. When his followers’ views became old-fashioned in the 16th century, the followers were ridiculed as Dunsmen or Dunses. A Duns could mean a hair-splitter, a dull pedant, or a person slow at learning; the last meaning survives in 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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