English

Alternative forms

• lick-spittle

Noun

lickspittle ‎(plural lickspittles)

1. A fawning toady; a base sycophant.^[1]
   • 1857, Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, ch. 5:

     "I've found you out and know you thoroughly, you mean, whining lickspittle!"

   • 1920, Sherwood Anderson, Poor White, ch. 21:

     "You're a suck, a suck and a lickspittle, that's what you are," said the pale man, his voice trembling with passion.

   • 2013 May 23, "Note to politicians: Stop blaming the media for your problems (Editorial)," Globe and Mail (Canada) (retrieved 23 May 2013):

     In Ottawa, Senator Marjory LeBreton claimed in a speech on Wednesday that allegations of spending abuses by her colleagues were “hyped-up media stories” that were inevitable in a “town populated by Liberal elites and their media lickspittles.”

2. (by extension) The practice of giving empty flattery for personal gain.

Synonyms

• (fawning toady): brown noser, flatterer, sycophant, toady

Derived terms

• lickspittling (verbal noun)

Translations

Verb

lickspittle ‎(third-person singular simple present lickspittles, present participle lickspittling, simple past and past participle lickspittled)

1. (transitive and intransitive) To play the toady; take the rôle of a lickspittle to please (someone).^[1]
   • 1886, Aylmer and Louise Maude (translators), Leo Tolstoy (author), The Light Shines in Darkness, act 1:

     "[Y]ou take his side, and that is wrong! . . . If some young school teacher, or some young lad, lickspittles to him, it's bad enough."

Translations

References

1. 1 2 3 4 5 “ˈlick-spittle” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989)
2. 1 2 “lick, v.” and “spittle, n.” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989)