roué

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   old-fashioned: a fashionable man devoted to pleasure and known for immoral, drunken, or sexually promiscuous behavior

   The young roué boasted of his conquests until the company tired of him.

Borrowed from French roué, literally 'broken on the wheel,' the past participle of rouer. The name was applied to the notoriously dissolute companions of the French regent Philippe II, supposedly men wicked enough to deserve that punishment, and then to any fashionable libertine.

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