choler

From Middle English coler (“yellow bile”), from Old French colere (“bile, anger”), from Latin cholera (“bilious disease”), from Ancient Greek χολή (kholḗ, “bile”). Doublet of cholera.

• enPR: kǒ'lər
• Rhymes: -əʊlə(ɹ)

choler (usually uncountable, plural cholers)

1. Anger or irritability.
   • c. 1587–1588, [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire, London: Scolar Press, 1973, →ISBN, Act III, scene ii:

     Threatned with frowning wrath and iealouſie,
     Surpriz’d with feare and hideous reuenge,
     I ſtand agaſt: but moſt aſtonied
     To ſee his choller ſhut in ſecrete thoughtes,
     And wrapt in ſilence of his angry ſoule.

   • 1808, Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote, page 127:

     This roused the tinker's choler, already provoked at Tugwell's amorous freedom with his doxy, and he gave him a click in the mazard. Tugwell had not been used tamely to receive a kick or a cuff; he, therefore, gave the tinker a rejoinder, […]

2. One of the four humours of ancient physiology, also known as yellow bile.

• cholera
• choleric

• orchel