/læmˈpuːn/
[noun] A piece of writing, drawing, or speech that makes fun of someone in a cruel or mocking way, often to criticise a public figure or institution. It can also be used as a verb meaning to publicly mock or ridicule someone.
Lampoon may have started life as a drinking song refrain — the French word for 'let us drink' shouted between verses of crude mockery.
The word 'lampoon' arrives in English in the mid-17th century, most likely around the 1640s, borrowed directly from the French 'lampon', a word that referred to a crude, mocking song or satirical piece aimed at a specific person. The French term itself is thought to derive from 'lampons', the first-person plural imperative of 'lamper', meaning 'to guzzle' or 'to drink greedily'. The connection between drinking and mockery is not as strange as it might seem — these sharp, vicious verses were often sung in taverns, punctuated by the roaring refrain 'lampons!', meaning 'let us drink!', which gave the whole rowdy genre its name.
The deeper roots of 'lamper' take us further into linguistic history. It is related to 'laper', an Old French verb meaning 'to lap up' liquid, which in turn traces back to a common Germanic source connected to words like the Old English 'lapian', also meaning to lap or drink. This same root gave English the word 'lap' in its liquid-drinking sense — so when a cat laps up milk today, it is using a verb distantly related to the bawdy French drinking songs that gave us 'lampoon'. The chain runs: Germanic *lapōn → Old English lapian → Old French laper → Old French lamper → French lampons → English lampoon.
When the word entered English, it described a short, personal, and often savage piece of satirical writing directed at an individual — not gentle teasing, but the kind of writing designed to wound. The 17th century was a golden age for this kind of literary attack. Political pamphlets, broadsheets, and verses circulated freely in coffee houses and taverns, and powerful figures — politicians, clergymen, even royalty — could find themselves skewered in print. Writers like John Dryden and Alexander Pope raised the lampoon to an art form, though they more often used the closely related term 'satire' for their most polished work.
Over time, 'lampoon' shifted from describing a song to describing any written or visual parody that ridicules a person or institution. The word gained a verb form in English — 'to lampoon someone' — meaning to publicly mock or caricature them. This verbal use became common in the 18th and 19th centuries as newspapers and illustrated magazines like Punch made satirical attack a staple of public life. A lampoon no longer needed to be sung; it could be a cartoon, a sketch, or a scathing editorial.
In modern English, 'lampoon' is perhaps most famously associated with the American humour magazine National Lampoon, founded in 1970, which brought the word to a new generation through its anarchic, irreverent comedy. The magazine's title was a deliberate nod to the word's long history of institutional mockery and social subversion. Today, to lampoon someone is to hold them up for public ridicule — a practice as old as human society itself, even if the word is only a few centuries old.