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  1. Churl - Wikipedia

    A churl (Old High German karal), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man" or more particularly a "free man", but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelled ċeorl(e), and denoting the lowest rank of freemen. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it later came to mean the opposite of nobility and royalty, "a common person". Says Chadwick:

    A churl (Old High German karal), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man" or more particularly a "free man", but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelled ċeorl(e), and denoting the lowest rank of freemen. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it later came to mean the opposite of nobility and royalty, "a common person". Says Chadwick:

    we find that the distinction between thegn and ceorl is from the time of Aethelstan the broad line of demarcation between the classes of society.

    This meaning held through the 15th century, but by then the word had taken on negative overtones, meaning "a country person" and then "a low fellow". By the 19th century, a new and pejorative meaning arose, "one inclined to uncivil or loutish behaviour"—hence "churlish" (cf. the pejorative sense of the term boor, whose original meaning of "country person" or "farmer" is preserved in Dutch and Afrikaans boer and German Bauer, although the latter has its own pejorative connotation…

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    In most Germanic languages this word never took on the English meaning of "lowly peasant" and retains its original meaning of "fellow, guy"; cf. West Frisian: keardel, archaic tsjerl, tsjirl, Dutch: kerel, Low German: Kerl (also borrowed into German), Swedish: karl, Faroese: kallur and so on.

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  2. Dictionary
    churl
    [CHərl]
    noun
    churl (noun) · churls (plural noun)
    1. an impolite and mean-spirited person.
      • archaic
        a miser.
      • archaic
        a person of low birth; a peasant.
    Origin
    Old English ceorl, of West Germanic origin; related to Dutch kerel and German Kerl ‘fellow’, also to carl and ceorl.
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