Other forms: scolds, scolded, scolding
To scold is to tell somebody off angrily. Scold a child, get scolded, scolding him for it.
It is what an adult does to a child or an animal, and using it of one adult to another sounds condescending — which is why it turns up in complaints about how people are spoken to. As a noun, a scold was historically a woman held to be a nuisance for quarrelling in public, and it was a punishable offence with its own instrument, the scold's bridle, which is a genuinely ugly piece of history.
1verbscoldTo tell somebody off angrily.
“Mum scolded us for coming home covered in mud.”
2nounhistoricallyHistorically, a person punished for public quarrelling.
“In the Middle Ages, a woman found guilty of being a scold might be ducked in the village pond.”
scold is an angry rebuke.
Middle English scold came first as a noun, possibly from Old Norse skald, a poet — since skalds wrote mocking verse. The verb was made from the noun.
Middle English
scold
English, today
scold
The noun is from Middle English scold, skald, first attested in the 12th or 13th century (as scold, scolde, skolde, skald). The verb is from Middle English scolden, first attested in the late 1300s. Most dictionaries derive the verb from the noun and say the noun is probably from Old Norse skald (“poet”) (cognate with Icelandic skáld (“poet, scop”)), as skalds sometimes wrote insulting poems, though another view is that the Norse and English words are cognate to each other and to Old High German skeltan (whence Modern German schelten (“to scold, chide”)), Old Dutch skeldan (whence Modern Dutch schelden (“to scold, berate”)), all inherited from Proto-Germanic skeldaną (“scold”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Ways of Speaking