Other forms: dunces
A dunce is a hopelessly slow learner. Once made to wear a cone-shaped hat and sit in a corner.
The dunce's cap was a real and cruel classroom practice into the twentieth century. The word has a strange history, since it comes from the name of a genuinely brilliant medieval philosopher, John Duns Scotus, whose followers were mocked as unable to think for themselves. It is dated now and best avoided about anybody, since nobody learns anything from being called one.
1noundunceA person regarded as slow to learn.
“He was written off as a dunce at nine and got a first at twenty-one.”
1530, named after John Duns Scotus. Scotus was ironically a well-known Scottish thinker; his followers, however, opposed the philosophers of the Renaissance, and thus "dunce" was first used to describe someone rejecting new knowledge in 1530; later, any person deemed stupid.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA