"Tom Swifty" meaning in English

See Tom Swifty in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: Tom Swifties [plural]
Etymology: Referring to the Tom Swift series of books, whose authors frequently avoided the word "said" in favour of other constructions, + -y. Etymology templates: {{suffix|en||y}} + -y Head templates: {{en-noun|nolinkhead=1}} Tom Swifty (plural Tom Swifties)
  1. A humorous phrase in which a supposed quotation is linked by a pun to the manner in which it is attributed. Wikipedia link: Tom Swift Synonyms: Tom Swiftie Related terms: elegant variation, Wellerism, wrylie

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

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Download raw JSONL data for Tom Swifty meaning in English (1.6kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-12-21 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-12-04 using wiktextract (d8cb2f3 and 4e554ae). 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.