"know-nothing" meaning in English

See know-nothing in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

Etymology: Essentially deverbal in nature, albeit not from a unitary phrasal verb; compare do-nothing § Etymology. Etymology templates: {{m|en|do-nothing#Etymology|do-nothing § Etymology}} do-nothing § Etymology Head templates: {{en-adj|-}} know-nothing (not comparable)
  1. Ignorant; characterized by foolish denial of facts or beliefs in that which is not true. Tags: not-comparable
    Sense id: en-know-nothing-en-adj-1kT4i0vW Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with language name categories using raw markup, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English exocentric verb-noun compounds, English links with manual fragments, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 83 17 Disambiguation of English entries with language name categories using raw markup: 83 17 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 80 20 Disambiguation of English exocentric verb-noun compounds: 47 53 Disambiguation of English links with manual fragments: 73 27 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 80 20

Noun

Forms: know-nothings [plural]
Etymology: Essentially deverbal in nature, albeit not from a unitary phrasal verb; compare do-nothing § Etymology. Etymology templates: {{m|en|do-nothing#Etymology|do-nothing § Etymology}} do-nothing § Etymology Head templates: {{en-noun}} know-nothing (plural know-nothings)
  1. An ignorant person; one who lacks knowledge. Categories (topical): People Synonyms: ignoramus
    Sense id: en-know-nothing-en-noun-7LO0NPmZ Disambiguation of People: 43 57 Categories (other): English exocentric verb-noun compounds Disambiguation of English exocentric verb-noun compounds: 47 53

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for know-nothing meaning in English (3.5kB)

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        {
          "ref": "2017 February 20, Paul Mason, “Climate scepticism is a far-right badge of honour – even in sweltering Australia”, in the Guardian",
          "text": "All over the world, know-nothing xenophobes are claiming – without evidence – that climate science is rigged.",
          "type": "quotation"
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      "id": "en-know-nothing-en-adj-1kT4i0vW",
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          "belief",
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      "tags": [
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        "An ignorant person; one who lacks knowledge."
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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 2024-04-30 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (210104c and c9440ce). 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.