Meaning
Cheerful and good-humoured - hearty, merry, quick to laugh. The word describes a whole settled temperament rather than a passing mood, and it still carries a suggestion of generous size: jovial hosts, jovial uncles, jovial publicans. Warmly old-fashioned in the best way; the exclamation by Jove, from Roman courtroom oaths, is its domesticated cousin. The old antonym is saturnine. Regional use: General English; Roman-astrological origin.
Origin
Jove - Jupiter, king of the Roman gods - gave his name to the planet, and medieval and Renaissance astrology held that those born under Jupiter's influence were jolly, optimistic, and buoyant: jovial began as the astrological label for the lucky and ended as the everyday word for merry. The record is unusually tidy: first recorded in English in 1590, from Italian gioviale via French, from Late Latin Iovialis, of Jove; Gabriel Harvey wrote in 1593 that the joviall complexion is soverainly beholding to nature, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy in 1624 counted princes among the most secure, happy, joviall and merry. The astrological sense stayed explicit for centuries - a 1682 manual says Jupiter inclineth the native to be jovial and merry - and Dickens's Christmas weather of 1843, clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold, made the word the permanent property of the season.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a jovial mood
- by Jove
- jovial host
Usage Examples
- The committee's most jovial member proposed funding the bar first and the telescope second.
- A jovial landlord pulled pints through the flood, remarking that the water had reached last year's mark.
- His jovial manner of speech survived the audit, the appeal, and finally the tribunal too.