"mean girl" meaning in English

See mean girl in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: mean girls [plural]
Etymology: Popularized by the 2004 teen comedy film Mean Girls. Head templates: {{en-noun}} mean girl (plural mean girls)
  1. (informal) A girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying and cliquey behaviour, especially at a high school. Wikipedia link: Mean Girls, mean girl Tags: informal Synonyms: meangirl
    Sense id: en-mean_girl-en-noun-dLOuEM-c Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for mean girl meaning in English (2.4kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "Popularized by the 2004 teen comedy film Mean Girls.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "mean girls",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "mean girl (plural mean girls)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2008, Laura Ross, The Valley Girl Turns 40, page 110",
          "text": "Before you know it, they're off to junior high. At this point, you start to kind of remember things from the times when you were there, especially the mean girl stuff.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2018 December 7, Mary Ann Harlan, The Girl-Positive Library: Inspiring Confidence, Creativity, and Curiosity in Young Women, ABC-CLIO, page 48",
          "text": "When mean girls are protagonists, unlikability is used to provide complexity to their narration that reminds us of mean girl as person.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2018 December 17, Patrice A. Oppliger, Tweencom Girls: Gender and Adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms, Rowman & Littlefield, page 6",
          "text": "African American mean girls include Davida Williams as Claire in Lizzie McGuire, Taveeta Szymanowicz as Valerie in Make It Pop, LaTangela as Maritza in Taina, and Shanica Knowles as Amber in Hannah Montana.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2021 March 18, John Fox Bershof, MD, The Second History of Man, skynetMD",
          "text": "This dipping into and out of the worlds of Viennese composers and American mean girls was a roundabout way of discussing how the physician Ádám Politzer had the good fortune to learn medicine in Vienna during the Second Viennese School, amid all that creativity and learning and good music.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying and cliquey behaviour, especially at a high school."
      ],
      "id": "en-mean_girl-en-noun-dLOuEM-c",
      "links": [
        [
          "girl",
          "girl#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "social status",
          "social status#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "bullying",
          "bullying#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "cliquey",
          "cliquey#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "high school",
          "high school#Noun"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal) A girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying and cliquey behaviour, especially at a high school."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "meangirl"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Mean Girls",
        "mean girl"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "mean girl"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "Popularized by the 2004 teen comedy film Mean Girls.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "mean girls",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "mean girl (plural mean girls)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English informal terms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2008, Laura Ross, The Valley Girl Turns 40, page 110",
          "text": "Before you know it, they're off to junior high. At this point, you start to kind of remember things from the times when you were there, especially the mean girl stuff.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2018 December 7, Mary Ann Harlan, The Girl-Positive Library: Inspiring Confidence, Creativity, and Curiosity in Young Women, ABC-CLIO, page 48",
          "text": "When mean girls are protagonists, unlikability is used to provide complexity to their narration that reminds us of mean girl as person.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2018 December 17, Patrice A. Oppliger, Tweencom Girls: Gender and Adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms, Rowman & Littlefield, page 6",
          "text": "African American mean girls include Davida Williams as Claire in Lizzie McGuire, Taveeta Szymanowicz as Valerie in Make It Pop, LaTangela as Maritza in Taina, and Shanica Knowles as Amber in Hannah Montana.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2021 March 18, John Fox Bershof, MD, The Second History of Man, skynetMD",
          "text": "This dipping into and out of the worlds of Viennese composers and American mean girls was a roundabout way of discussing how the physician Ádám Politzer had the good fortune to learn medicine in Vienna during the Second Viennese School, amid all that creativity and learning and good music.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying and cliquey behaviour, especially at a high school."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "girl",
          "girl#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "social status",
          "social status#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "bullying",
          "bullying#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "cliquey",
          "cliquey#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "high school",
          "high school#Noun"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal) A girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying and cliquey behaviour, especially at a high school."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Mean Girls",
        "mean girl"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "meangirl"
    }
  ],
  "word": "mean girl"
}

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.