Jollity is cheerful fun and high spirits, the kind of lively happiness you feel at a celebration or party. When a room is full of jollity, people are laughing, joking, and genuinely enjoying themselves together.

The word captures energetic, shared happiness. Jollity has energy to it: think of a holiday dinner where everyone’s telling stories and laughing, or a carnival midway buzzing with excited voices and music. There’s a social quality to jollity too. While you might feel happy reading alone in your room, jollity happens when people share their good mood with each other.

Charles Dickens loved describing scenes of jollity in his novels, especially in A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge eventually joins in the jollity of Christmas Day after years of grumpy isolation.

You might hear about “the jollity of the occasion” at a wedding or graduation party, or notice how someone’s jollity makes everyone around them feel more cheerful. When the jollity dies down, the party’s winding down and people are getting quieter and sleepier.