sb. and a. Also 7 fainiant, faitneant, faytneant. [F. fainéant (16th c. also fait-néant) ‘do-nothing,’ f. fait, 3rd pers. sing. pres. of faire to do + néant nothing; really an etymologizing perversion of OF. faignant sluggard (still current as a vulgarism), pr. pple. of faindre to skulk: see FAINT.]
A. sb. One who does nothing; an idler. Often with allusion to the rois fainéants, ‘sluggard kings,’ a designation of the later Merovingians.
1619. Sir D. Carleton, in Letters … England and Germany, etc. (Camden), 93. The two last Emperors, which were both faineants.
1621. [see FACTOTUM 1].
1672. Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691), 13. So as there are yet to sparem who are Casherers and Fait-neants … 220,000.
1855. H. G. Liddell, Hist. Rome, V. xlvi. The fainéans who had disappointed them could hardly appear in public.
B. adj. That does nothing; indolent, idle.
1855. Milman, Lat. Chr. (1864), IX. XIV. i. 14. In France, the prodigality of the weaker Kings of each race, and each race successively, from the fainéant Merovingians, seemed to dwindle down into inevitable weakness, had vied with each other in heaping estates upon the clergy, and in founding and endowing monasteries.
1868. M. Pattison, Academ. Org., iv. 102ú3. We wish to restore the road, and maintain one broad-guage line of refining education, along which all our youth, the aspiring and enterprising, as well as the faineant aristocrat and the apathetic dullard, shall be willing to travel.
