"Bunburying" meaning in English

See Bunburying in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: Bunbury + -ing, coined by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) after Bunbury, the fictitious disabled friend of the character Algernon whose supposed illness is used as an excuse to avoid social engagements. Etymology templates: {{suffix|en|Bunbury|ing}} Bunbury + -ing, {{coin|en|Oscar Wilde|nocap=1|nocat=1}} coined by Oscar Wilde Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} Bunburying (uncountable)
  1. (humorous) Avoiding one's duties and responsibilities by claiming to have appointments to see a fictitious person. Wikipedia link: The Importance of Being Earnest Tags: humorous, uncountable Related terms: Bunbury [verb]

Download JSON data for Bunburying meaning in English (2.6kB)

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          "ref": "1991, Helen A. Garten, Why Bank Regulation Failed: Designing a Bank Regulatory Strategy for the 1990s",
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        "(humorous) Avoiding one's duties and responsibilities by claiming to have appointments to see a fictitious person."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-27 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (bb24e0f and c7ea76d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.