"Palookaville" meaning in English

See Palookaville in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Proper name

Etymology: From palooka (“a stupid or oafish person”) + -ville. Popularized in On the Waterfront (1954). Etymology templates: {{suffix|en|palooka|ville|t1=a stupid or oafish person}} palooka (“a stupid or oafish person”) + -ville Head templates: {{en-proper noun}} Palookaville
  1. (US) An imaginary town, the natural home of the mediocre and incompetent. Wikipedia link: On the Waterfront, Palookaville Tags: US Categories (topical): Fictional locations Derived forms: one-way ticket to Palookaville Related terms: Podunk

Download JSON data for Palookaville meaning in English (2.4kB)

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  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "palooka",
        "3": "ville",
        "t1": "a stupid or oafish person"
      },
      "expansion": "palooka (“a stupid or oafish person”) + -ville",
      "name": "suffix"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "From palooka (“a stupid or oafish person”) + -ville. Popularized in On the Waterfront (1954).",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "Palookaville",
      "name": "en-proper noun"
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "name",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "American English",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
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        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English terms suffixed with -ville",
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        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Fictional locations",
          "orig": "en:Fictional locations",
          "parents": [
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      "derived": [
        {
          "word": "one-way ticket to Palookaville"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2010 March 15, Jason Zinoman, “Dreams Die Hard, Even in Palookaville”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "But what holds it is the working-class poetry of Derek Ahonen’s script, with the “broken down dreams” and a “gutter full of empty stomachs” of a hard-boiled era of soulful stiffs and dreamers going nowhere. It’s the speeded-up sound of a return trip to Palookaville.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2012 September 7, Rachel Saltz, “Living in a Material World”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "Ram’s descent plays out against a backdrop of New York as Palookaville, full of free-floating hostility and natives who spout movie-bred clichés.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "An imaginary town, the natural home of the mediocre and incompetent."
      ],
      "id": "en-Palookaville-en-name-86bpFrk~",
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        [
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          "incompetent"
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        "(US) An imaginary town, the natural home of the mediocre and incompetent."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "Podunk"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "US"
      ],
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{
  "derived": [
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      "word": "one-way ticket to Palookaville"
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  ],
  "etymology_text": "From palooka (“a stupid or oafish person”) + -ville. Popularized in On the Waterfront (1954).",
  "head_templates": [
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      "args": {},
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    {
      "word": "Podunk"
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        "English uncountable nouns",
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      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2010 March 15, Jason Zinoman, “Dreams Die Hard, Even in Palookaville”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "But what holds it is the working-class poetry of Derek Ahonen’s script, with the “broken down dreams” and a “gutter full of empty stomachs” of a hard-boiled era of soulful stiffs and dreamers going nowhere. It’s the speeded-up sound of a return trip to Palookaville.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
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        "(US) An imaginary town, the natural home of the mediocre and incompetent."
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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 2024-05-18 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (1d5a7d1 and 304864d). 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.