Definition of "gambol"

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

1835: William Gilmore Simms, The Partisan: A Romance of the Revolution, chapter XI, page 134 (Harper)

At our old pastimes in the hall⁠We gambol’d, making vain pretence⁠Of gladness, with an awful senseOf one mute Shadow watching all.

1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], Canto XXX, page 48

[…] 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.

1907, Paul Lafargue, The rights of the horse, page 160

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

1945 August 17, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter 2, in Animal Farm […], London: Secker & Warburg

[The whales] quite enjoyed themselves gamboling freely among the waves in the sunshine.

1948, F. H. Lyon, chapter 5, in Kon-Tiki, translation of original by Thor Heyerdahl, page 143

Three girls moved across the billiard-table lawn of a great manor house, circling and swarming about a common center of gravity like gamboling sparrows.

1995, Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, page 286

They were in the white wood / Gamboling out to picnic

2012, ミラクルミュージカル (lyrics and music), “Murders”, in Hawaii: Part II

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?

c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act V, scene i], page 278, column 1

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.

1843, Edgar Allan Poe, The Gold Bug, page 10

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.

1819 June 23, Geoffrey Crayon [pseudonym; Washington Irving], “The Voyage”, in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., number I, New York, N.Y.: […] C. S. Van Winkle, […], page 14

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?

1874 October, “Salad Days”, in The American Educational Monthly, page 462