"Humpty Dumptyism" meaning in English

See Humpty Dumptyism in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: en-au-Humpty Dumptyism.ogg [Australia]
Etymology: From the fictional character Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who, when asked what he meant by "glory", replies "I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'". Alice protests that this isn't the meaning of "glory" and Humpty Dumpty replies "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." Head templates: {{en-noun|-|nolinkhead=1}} Humpty Dumptyism (uncountable)
  1. (idiomatic) The practice of insisting that a word means whatever one wishes it to. Wikipedia link: Humpty Dumptyism Tags: idiomatic, uncountable Synonyms: Humpty-Dumptyism

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for Humpty Dumptyism meaning in English (2.3kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "From the fictional character Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who, when asked what he meant by \"glory\", replies \"I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'\". Alice protests that this isn't the meaning of \"glory\" and Humpty Dumpty replies \"When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.\"",
  "head_templates": [
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2003, J. A. Keats, Norman Cliff, Ordinal Measurement in the Behavioral Sciences, page 31",
          "text": "It seems to be saying one or both of two things. One is that any score that comes out of any procedure that purports to measure intelligence is a value of the scale, intelligence. If so, this would be Humpty Dumptyism.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The practice of insisting that a word means whatever one wishes it to."
      ],
      "id": "en-Humpty_Dumptyism-en-noun-ocX~I4mW",
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) The practice of insisting that a word means whatever one wishes it to."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "Humpty-Dumptyism"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic",
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      "wikipedia": [
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      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/En-au-Humpty_Dumptyism.ogg",
      "tags": [
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    }
  ],
  "word": "Humpty Dumptyism"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "From the fictional character Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who, when asked what he meant by \"glory\", replies \"I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'\". Alice protests that this isn't the meaning of \"glory\" and Humpty Dumpty replies \"When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.\"",
  "head_templates": [
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      "expansion": "Humpty Dumptyism (uncountable)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
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        "English eponyms",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2003, J. A. Keats, Norman Cliff, Ordinal Measurement in the Behavioral Sciences, page 31",
          "text": "It seems to be saying one or both of two things. One is that any score that comes out of any procedure that purports to measure intelligence is a value of the scale, intelligence. If so, this would be Humpty Dumptyism.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The practice of insisting that a word means whatever one wishes it to."
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) The practice of insisting that a word means whatever one wishes it to."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic",
        "uncountable"
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      "wikipedia": [
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      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/3/34/En-au-Humpty_Dumptyism.ogg/En-au-Humpty_Dumptyism.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/En-au-Humpty_Dumptyism.ogg",
      "tags": [
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  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "Humpty-Dumptyism"
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  "word": "Humpty Dumptyism"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-06-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (384852d and db5a844). 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.