AGELASTIC/eɪˈdʒɪlæstɪk/
Unmarked by laughter or rarely laughing.
The Oxford English Dictionary not only marks this as obsolete, but finds only two examples, from seventeenth and eighteenth century dictionaries.
Searching the literature shows that the word’s not that rare and in fact seems to be enjoying something of a mini-boom in popularity at the moment. Its modern recrudescence may have been provoked through its use by George Meredith in An Essay on Comedy, dated 1877: “It is but one step from being agelastic to misogelastic” (miso- means hatred of something, as in misogyny, the hatred of women), though nearly all the examples I can find are in works of the 1990s onwards. It turned up in an article in the Guardian in October 2008, together with agelast, meaning a person who rarely or never laughs. Walter Redfern utilises it in his book French Laughter: Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier (2008): “Is not sex spasmodically but regularly comic, for everyone except the most mechanical, brutal, and agelastic performers?”
Its opposite, gelastic, is more common and hasn’t suffered the vicissitudes of fortune of its negative partner. You will come across this most frequently in medical terminology, principally in gelastic seizure, a form of epilepsy in which brief bursts of pathological laughter are a symptom.
Both words derive ultimately from Greek gelos, laughter.
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