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noel

nouninterjectioncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//nəʊˈɛl//

A kind of hymn, or canticle, of mediaeval origin, sung in honor of the birth of Christ; a Christmas carol.

noun

  1. 1

    A kind of hymn, or canticle, of mediaeval origin, sung in honor of the birth of Christ; a Christmas carol.

    The first Nowell the Angel did say / Was to three poor Shepherds in the fields as they lay[…]

Etymology

From Middle English nowel, from Anglo-Norman noel, Middle French noel, a variant of nael, from Latin adjective nātālis (“natal, having to do with birth”).

interjection

  1. 1

    archaicA wish or expression of commemoration of Christmas.

    And may all my enemies go to hell! / Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!

Forms

plural
noels
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).