gambol

verb

1. (intransitive)To move about playfully; to frolic.

   “The lawn spread freely onward, as of old, over which, in sweet company, he had once gambolled.”

   “At our old pastimes in the hall ⁠We gambol’d, making vain pretence ⁠Of gladness, with an awful sense Of one mute Shadow watching all.”

   “[…] she remains near him to suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow, in which he gambols until he is grown.”

   “And, in very truth, run and leap he did, gambolling wildly down the stretch of lawn outside the long window.”

   “In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into great leaps of excitement.”

2. (British, West-Midlands)To do a forward roll.

noun

1. An instance of running or skipping about playfully.

   “Heere hung those lipps, that I haue kist I know not how oft. VVhere be your Iibes now? Your Gambals? Your Songs? Your flashes of Merriment that were wont to set the Table on a Rore?”

   “When his gambols were over, I looked at the paper, and, to speak the truth, found myself not a little puzzled at what my friend had depicted.”

2. An instance of more general frisking or frolicking.

   “There was a delicious sensation of mingled security and awe with which I looked down, from my giddy height, on the monsters of the deep at their uncouth gambols.”

   “The season of salad days has been rightly called a season of folly—rightly, because nature wisely intended salad days for folly, and we are wise to regard them as a time for folly. But are we wise when, halting upon the crutches age finds convenient after the gambols of youth have lost their attractions, we condemn this season of harmless folly to perpetual reprobation?”