cad1
/kad
/noun informal, dated
A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards a woman: her adulterous cad of a husband...
- Britain's biggest cads, rogues and evil-doers from the past 1,000 years have been given special recognition by historians.
- He, true to form, behaves like a cad and leaves her for the gambling tables and his deserved fate.
- In short, Diplomacy is not a nice game; to win, it is necessary to behave like a complete cad.
Derivatives
caddish
/ adjective ...- I remember feeling rather caddish: an 18-year-old seducer, in the Caribbean with the beautiful daughter of a terrifying steel magnate at 3 o'clock in the morning.
- But his books are a celebration of caddish behaviour which, when you think about it, isn't much different from the laddish variety.
- His caddish mission is to steal her petticoat as a ‘souvenir’ to present to her wealthy fiancé to prove her unfaithfulness.
caddishly
- He fell in and out of love with metronomic frequency, caddishly abandoning each lover for the next.
- When he caddishly refuses, Isabelle accuses him of confusing life with cinema and commits suicide.
- His leading characters are invariably womanisers, middle-class, caddishly intelligent and orphans.
caddishness
/ noun ...- A cad himself, he is quick to detect caddishness in others.
- For the narrator, the ‘crime’ is caddishness, not coition - a failing of etiquette rather than morality.
- To compound this apparent caddishness, Howard is also a fellow traveler and a boorish personality.
Origin
Late 18th century (denoting a passenger picked up by the driver of a horse-drawn coach for personal profit): abbreviation of caddie or cadet.
This is a dated term to describe a man who behaves dishonourably towards a woman, and appears to have arisen at the universities as a colloquial insult for a ‘man of low, vulgar manners’. It may have originated at Oxford in a contemptuous application to townsmen in the ‘town-and-gown’ rivalry. Cad, however, once referred to any passenger picked up by the driver of a horse-drawn coach for his personal profit. It is an abbreviation of Scottish caddie or its more standard form cadet. This term for a younger son comes from French Gascon dialect capdet, ‘little head’ hence ‘junior’ from Latin caput ‘head’.
Rhymes
CAD2
abbreviation
1Computer-aided design.
2Canadian dollar.