A lazy person who idles about all day. Widely shared as old slang, but not found in any of the old slang dictionaries it is usually said to come from.
Unknown — no period source found.
What it really means
A dewdropper is someone who does nothing all day. The picture is easy to see — a person so idle the dew settles on them — and that picture is most of what the word has going for it.
What it does not have, as far as we can find, is a history.
The lists that share it disagree about when it is from. Some call it Victorian. Many more call it 1920s slang. Those are sixty years apart, and a word that is "from" either one ought to turn up somewhere.
So we looked in the places these lists usually draw on, reading the books themselves rather than trusting quotations of them:
- J. Redding Ware's Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909) — the standard dictionary of Victorian slang. Not there.
- The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Not there.
- Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847). Not there.
None of that proves nobody ever said it. Slang lives in speech long before it reaches a dictionary, and plenty never reaches one. It does mean that the confident date attached to it online is not coming from the sources it seems to be coming from.
If you want an old word for the same idleness with its paperwork in order, there is lollygag, recorded in 1859.
Where it comes from
Myths & misconceptions
Dewdropper is Victorian slang.
Some lists say Victorian, many more say 1920s, and they cannot both be right. We could not find it in the standard Victorian slang dictionary (Ware, 1909), the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, or Halliwell's 1847 dictionary of archaic words. That does not prove nobody said it — it means the record the lists point to does not have it.
How it connects
- Zounderkitethe other word on the list we could not find in any old dictionary.
- Lollygaga documented word for the same idleness, first recorded in 1859.
Questions people ask
- Is dewdropper a real word?
- It is a real word in the sense that people use it and it appears on many lists. What we could not find is a period source: it is absent from Ware's 1909 dictionary of Victorian slang, the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and Halliwell's 1847 dictionary of archaic words.
- Is it Victorian or 1920s?
- Lists disagree. Most present it as 1920s slang, some as Victorian. We have not found a dated source for either.
- What is a better-documented word for the same thing?
- Lollygag, recorded in American English from 1859, means to dawdle or waste time.