"nudge nudge wink wink" meaning in English

See nudge nudge wink wink in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Interjection

IPA: /ˈnʌdʒ nʌdʒ ˌwɪŋk wɪŋk/ [General-American, Received-Pronunciation] Audio: en-au-nudge nudge wink wink.ogg [Australia]
Etymology: Suggests that the speaker is nudging, and winking at, the person to whom the term is directed. Popularized by the Monty Python sketch "Candid Photography" (better known as Nudge Nudge). Head templates: {{en-interj}} nudge nudge wink wink
  1. (idiomatic, humorous, also attributive) A phrase used to hint that the speaker is euphemistically referring to something else. Wikipedia link: Gale Henry, Nudge Nudge Tags: also, attributive, humorous, idiomatic Synonyms: wink wink nudge nudge Related terms: as the actress said to the bishop, if you know what I mean, that's what she said

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for nudge nudge wink wink meaning in English (4.2kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "Suggests that the speaker is nudging, and winking at, the person to whom the term is directed. Popularized by the Monty Python sketch \"Candid Photography\" (better known as Nudge Nudge).",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "nudge nudge wink wink",
      "name": "en-interj"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "intj",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
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          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with language name categories using raw markup",
            "Entry maintenance"
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          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English reduplications",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
          "parents": [
            "Terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1985 June 7, Michael John Cullen, “Electricity (South Island Concession) Amendment Bill”, in Parliamentary Debates (Hansard): First Session, Forty-first Parliament, 1985: House of Representatives, volume 462 (Comprising the Period from 22 March to 7 June 1985), Wellington, N.Z.: V. R. Ward, Government Printer, →OCLC, page 4609",
          "text": "The Opposition is so insensitive to the South Island that it gets a North Island member to move a private member's Bill about a South Island issue. […] The Bill represents a broken half-promise—\"nudge, nudge, wink, wink\"—by the Leader of the Opposition in Timaru only a short time ago. […] So down [to the South Island] he goes—\"nudge, nudge, wink, wink\". They let him out of the closet for a while to go down to talk to some South Islanders and he told them they would get 25 percent and 10 percent. Now there is a Bill from a North Island Opposition member, the member for New Plymouth—a Bill that backs off from that promise in the space of a couple of weeks.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007, Rikke Schubart, “High Trash: Lara, Beatrix, and Three Angels”, in Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, page 300",
          "text": "Toby Miller, a professor at New York University, commented on [actress Drew] Barrymore's attitude: \"She seems to be saying, 'I see no reason to hide my sexuality, my body—I want to celebrate it' … And all the women I know, even those who thought such a spectacle was tragic in the Seventies, love it. It's a nudge-nudge, wink-wink parody.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2014, Lynda Bellingham, chapter 2, in The Boy I Love, London: Simon & Schuster",
          "text": "Sally unlocked her tiny cubicle and found herself feeling quite nostalgic. No more early mornings on the number 13 bus to work. No more Geordie and his nudge nudge, wink wink greetings; from next month she would be a professional actress, working in repertory.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A phrase used to hint that the speaker is euphemistically referring to something else."
      ],
      "id": "en-nudge_nudge_wink_wink-en-intj-26-4nuB9",
      "links": [
        [
          "humorous",
          "humorous"
        ],
        [
          "hint",
          "hint#Verb"
        ],
        [
          "speaker",
          "speaker#English"
        ],
        [
          "euphemistically",
          "euphemistically#English"
        ],
        [
          "refer",
          "refer#English"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic, humorous, also attributive) A phrase used to hint that the speaker is euphemistically referring to something else."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "as the actress said to the bishop"
        },
        {
          "word": "if you know what I mean"
        },
        {
          "word": "that's what she said"
        }
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "wink wink nudge nudge"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "also",
        "attributive",
        "humorous",
        "idiomatic"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Gale Henry",
        "Nudge Nudge"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈnʌdʒ nʌdʒ ˌwɪŋk wɪŋk/",
      "tags": [
        "General-American",
        "Received-Pronunciation"
      ]
    },
    {
      "audio": "en-au-nudge nudge wink wink.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/d/d3/En-au-nudge_nudge_wink_wink.ogg/En-au-nudge_nudge_wink_wink.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/En-au-nudge_nudge_wink_wink.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "nudge nudge wink wink"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "Suggests that the speaker is nudging, and winking at, the person to whom the term is directed. Popularized by the Monty Python sketch \"Candid Photography\" (better known as Nudge Nudge).",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "nudge nudge wink wink",
      "name": "en-interj"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "intj",
  "related": [
    {
      "word": "as the actress said to the bishop"
    },
    {
      "word": "if you know what I mean"
    },
    {
      "word": "that's what she said"
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
        "English humorous terms",
        "English idioms",
        "English interjections",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English reduplications",
        "English terms with IPA pronunciation",
        "English terms with audio links",
        "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
        "English terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1985 June 7, Michael John Cullen, “Electricity (South Island Concession) Amendment Bill”, in Parliamentary Debates (Hansard): First Session, Forty-first Parliament, 1985: House of Representatives, volume 462 (Comprising the Period from 22 March to 7 June 1985), Wellington, N.Z.: V. R. Ward, Government Printer, →OCLC, page 4609",
          "text": "The Opposition is so insensitive to the South Island that it gets a North Island member to move a private member's Bill about a South Island issue. […] The Bill represents a broken half-promise—\"nudge, nudge, wink, wink\"—by the Leader of the Opposition in Timaru only a short time ago. […] So down [to the South Island] he goes—\"nudge, nudge, wink, wink\". They let him out of the closet for a while to go down to talk to some South Islanders and he told them they would get 25 percent and 10 percent. Now there is a Bill from a North Island Opposition member, the member for New Plymouth—a Bill that backs off from that promise in the space of a couple of weeks.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007, Rikke Schubart, “High Trash: Lara, Beatrix, and Three Angels”, in Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, page 300",
          "text": "Toby Miller, a professor at New York University, commented on [actress Drew] Barrymore's attitude: \"She seems to be saying, 'I see no reason to hide my sexuality, my body—I want to celebrate it' … And all the women I know, even those who thought such a spectacle was tragic in the Seventies, love it. It's a nudge-nudge, wink-wink parody.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2014, Lynda Bellingham, chapter 2, in The Boy I Love, London: Simon & Schuster",
          "text": "Sally unlocked her tiny cubicle and found herself feeling quite nostalgic. No more early mornings on the number 13 bus to work. No more Geordie and his nudge nudge, wink wink greetings; from next month she would be a professional actress, working in repertory.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A phrase used to hint that the speaker is euphemistically referring to something else."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "humorous",
          "humorous"
        ],
        [
          "hint",
          "hint#Verb"
        ],
        [
          "speaker",
          "speaker#English"
        ],
        [
          "euphemistically",
          "euphemistically#English"
        ],
        [
          "refer",
          "refer#English"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic, humorous, also attributive) A phrase used to hint that the speaker is euphemistically referring to something else."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "also",
        "attributive",
        "humorous",
        "idiomatic"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Gale Henry",
        "Nudge Nudge"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈnʌdʒ nʌdʒ ˌwɪŋk wɪŋk/",
      "tags": [
        "General-American",
        "Received-Pronunciation"
      ]
    },
    {
      "audio": "en-au-nudge nudge wink wink.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/d/d3/En-au-nudge_nudge_wink_wink.ogg/En-au-nudge_nudge_wink_wink.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/En-au-nudge_nudge_wink_wink.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "wink wink nudge nudge"
    }
  ],
  "word": "nudge nudge wink wink"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 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.