Lost Word of The Day (80)

We are all probably familiar with the noun a rake in the sense of a dissolute character prone to womanising and gambling, examples of whose progress were followed to good effect by the likes of William Hogarth and Igor Stravinsky. What I was gloriously unaware of until recently was that it is an abbreviation of rakehell, a word that carried the same connotations.

It probably owes its origin to the Middle English adjective rakel, which meant hasty, rash, or headstrong. Attested to the 1540s it also spawned the adjective rakehelly and spawned a cousin in rakeshame, meaning someone who lives shamefully, in the 1590s.

An example of its use is to be found in The Bladish Briton, a song reproduced in The Bacchanalian Magazine of 1793, which included the following lines; “ye Rakehells so jolly, / who hate melancholy, / and love a full flask and a doxy; / who ne’er from love’s feats, / like a coward retreats, / afraid that the harlot shall pox ye”.

With a dissolute lifestyle, what is a hell between friends.