Noun

(en noun)

A silly or foolish person.

* {{quote-book

, year=1680 , author=Matthew Stevenson , title=The wits paraphras'd: or, Paraphrase upon paraphrase: In a burlesque on the several late translations of Ovids Epistles ... citation , page=161 , passage=Tis such another Nincompoop ,
I sleep, and he begins to droop.
He sees, yet keeps his Eyes a winking,
Says nought, but pays it off with thinking. }}

* {{quote-book

, year=1694 , author=Thomas D'Urfey , title=The Comical History of Don Quixote: As it was Acted at the Queen's Theatre in Dorset-Garden ... , chapter=Part I, Act I, Scene I citation , page=6 , passage=...Heaven knows the time when? Art not thou asham’d to see me, thou Nincompoop ? }}

* 1905: Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=507211157&tag=Orczy,+Baroness:+The+Scarlet+Pimpernel,+1905&query=+nincompoop&id=OrcPimp]

No wonder that Chauvelin's spies had failed to detect, in the apparently brainless nincompoop , the man whose reckless daring and resourceful ingenuity had baffled the keenest French spies...

Noun

(en noun)

(informal) An incompetent or clumsy person.

*1899 ,

*:Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel, the man in pink pyjamas showing himself a hopeless duffer at the business.

(sports) A player having little skill, especially a golfer who duffs.

(archaic) A pedlar or hawker, especially one selling cheap or substandard goods.

(archaic) Cheap or substandard goods sold by a duffer .

A cow that does not produce milk.

* 1908 , Proceedings of the Agricultural Society of Trinidad and Tobago , Volume 8, page 116,

We have some good cows in this State, but, unfortunately, we have too many duffer cows that are not only being fed and milked at a loss hut are eating up a portion of the profit of the good cow which is being milked alongside them.

* 1934''', Victorian Department of Agriculture, ''Journal of Agriculture , Volume 32, page 293,

The truth is that cattlemen love a typical cow for her beauty and symmetry of form ; but every herd-testing dairyman knows that an ugly animal may be a good producer, while many a beautiful cow is a duffer .

(Australia, dated) A cattle thief; one who alters the brands of cattle.

* 2004 , Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation , page 112,

Judy was an associate (‘stud’) of a Whitefella cattle duffer named Brigalow Bill (aka WJJ Ward).

* 2010 , Evan McHugh, The Drovers

In the mid-1860s a duffer' named James Harnell, who went by the nickname Narran Jim, had taken stock he?d stolen from the district around Culgoa and Narran rivers across Queensland to the Cooper.An alert Bulloo Downs stockman contacted the police, and when Police Inspector Fitzgerald and eight Aboriginal troopers tracked Narran Jim and surrounded him while he was sleeping, the cattle ' duffer woke to find himself looking down the barrel of Fitzgerald?s revolver and seven years in jail.

* 2011 , Clancy Tucker, Gunnedah Hero , unnumbered page,

The cattle duffer ?s escape would have been impeded by those young ones. Calves can be unruly unless you move them carefully in the company of their mothers.