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toad

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//təʊd//
  • United States//toʊd//

An amphibian, a kind of frog (broad sense, order Anura) with shorter hindlegs and a drier, wartier skin, many in family Bufonidae.

noun

  1. 1

    An amphibian, a kind of frog (broad sense, order Anura) with shorter hindlegs and a drier, wartier skin, many in family Bufonidae.

    Shortly he heard the trolls coming. They had a fiddler with them, and some began dancing, while others fell to eating the Christmas fare on the table - some fried bacon, and some fried frogs and toads, and other nasty things which they had brought with them.

    1971, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger & John Densmore, "Riders on the Storm", The Doors, L.A. Woman. There's a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin' like a toad

  2. 2

    A contemptible or unpleasant person.

  3. 3

    An ugly person.

Etymology

From Middle English tode, toode, tadde, tade, from Old English *tāde, a shortened variant of Old English tādie, tādiġe (“toad”). Cognate with Scots tade, taid, taed, ted (“toad”). Compare also Danish tudse (“toad”), possibly originally from the same prehistoric root; also Swedish tåssa, tossa (“toad”), Old English tāxe (“toad”), Old English tosca (“toad”) by contrast.

verb

  1. 1

    informalTo expel (a user) permanently from a MUD or similar system, so that their account is deleted.

Forms

plural
toads
past tense
toaded
past participle
toaded
present participle
toading
third person singular
toads
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).