[f. FAWN v.1 + -ER1.] One who fawns, cringes, or flatters; a toady.
c. 1440. Promp. Parv., 146/1. Faynare, or flaterere, adulator.
1553. T. Wilson, Rhet., 106 b. Flatterers, fawners, and southers of mennes saiynges.
1685. Gracian’s Courtiers Orac., 156. All the Hair-brained, Vain, Opinionative, Capricious, Self-conceited, Extravagant, Fawners, Buffoons, News-mongers, Authours of Paradoxes, Phanaticks, and in a word, all sorts of irregular persons: all these, I say, are so many Monsters of impertinence.
a. 1715. Burnet, Own Time (1766), I. 68. His diary … represents him as an abject fawner on the Duke of Buckingham.
1812. Southey, Omniana, II. 322. Certainly he was no fawner.
1864. E. Sargent, Peculiar, I. 289. He dismissed his witnesses, and began to play the fawner once more.
