noun

• 1A rondeau, especially one of thirteen or fourteen lines set in three stanzas, with only two rhymes throughout and a two line refrain that opens the poem and recurs at the end of the second and third stanzas.

  ‘We are still writing sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, even pantoums and triolets, ballades and rondels, as well as inventing ‘nonce’ forms to suit our uses.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Does it matter whether one writes villanelles, rondels, sestinas or kyrielles?’
  • ‘Like all the poems in the cycle, it is cast as a rondel, with an ironic (here italicised) refrain.’

• 2A circular object or shape.

  More example sentences

  • ‘at the point where these paths join there is a rondel with a fountain’