"one weird trick" meaning in English

See one weird trick in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: One of various collocations that were found empirically in A-B testing to have high clickbait effectiveness on humans, at least at the time when they were not yet hackneyed. The choice of words was driven by their clickbaiting power. Head templates: {{head|en|noun}} one weird trick
  1. (informal) A supposed unusual and little-known solution to a problem, offered in deceptive and misleading advertising on the Internet. Wikipedia link: one weird trick Tags: informal Categories (topical): Advertising Hypernyms: trick

Download JSON data for one weird trick meaning in English (2.9kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "One of various collocations that were found empirically in A-B testing to have high clickbait effectiveness on humans, at least at the time when they were not yet hackneyed. The choice of words was driven by their clickbaiting power.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "noun"
      },
      "expansion": "one weird trick",
      "name": "head"
    }
  ],
  "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"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with topic categories using raw markup",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with topic categories using raw markup",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "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"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Advertising",
          "orig": "en:Advertising",
          "parents": [
            "Business",
            "Marketing",
            "Economics",
            "Society",
            "Social sciences",
            "All topics",
            "Sciences",
            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2015, Gin Jones, A Draw of Death: Helen Binney Mysteries book #3",
          "text": "The text itself read only slightly less formally and considerably more like a legitimate online resource than what Helen had expected: either a string of gibberish or else something comparable to the meaningless hyperbole of online ads promising to reveal one weird trick to weight loss, sexual stamina, or immense riches.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2016, Jennifer Noonan, No Map to This Country: One Family's Journey through Autism",
          "text": "The same questions over and over, as if somehow this time I would give them a different answer, something easy that would solve everything. One Weird Trick to Cure Autism!",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2016, Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games",
          "text": "The phonestack game isn't a “life hack” or a “brain hack” or a clickbaity “this one weird trick” or a clinically or even anecdotally psychologically effective mechanism for exercising willpower—it's just another thing you can do with your phones at dinner.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A supposed unusual and little-known solution to a problem, offered in deceptive and misleading advertising on the Internet."
      ],
      "hypernyms": [
        {
          "word": "trick"
        }
      ],
      "id": "en-one_weird_trick-en-noun-oXjxvp52",
      "links": [
        [
          "deceptive",
          "deceptive"
        ],
        [
          "misleading",
          "misleading"
        ],
        [
          "advertising",
          "advertising"
        ],
        [
          "Internet",
          "Internet"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal) A supposed unusual and little-known solution to a problem, offered in deceptive and misleading advertising on the Internet."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "one weird trick"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "one weird trick"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "One of various collocations that were found empirically in A-B testing to have high clickbait effectiveness on humans, at least at the time when they were not yet hackneyed. The choice of words was driven by their clickbaiting power.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "noun"
      },
      "expansion": "one weird trick",
      "name": "head"
    }
  ],
  "hypernyms": [
    {
      "word": "trick"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with topic categories using raw markup",
        "English informal terms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "en:Advertising"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2015, Gin Jones, A Draw of Death: Helen Binney Mysteries book #3",
          "text": "The text itself read only slightly less formally and considerably more like a legitimate online resource than what Helen had expected: either a string of gibberish or else something comparable to the meaningless hyperbole of online ads promising to reveal one weird trick to weight loss, sexual stamina, or immense riches.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2016, Jennifer Noonan, No Map to This Country: One Family's Journey through Autism",
          "text": "The same questions over and over, as if somehow this time I would give them a different answer, something easy that would solve everything. One Weird Trick to Cure Autism!",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2016, Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games",
          "text": "The phonestack game isn't a “life hack” or a “brain hack” or a clickbaity “this one weird trick” or a clinically or even anecdotally psychologically effective mechanism for exercising willpower—it's just another thing you can do with your phones at dinner.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A supposed unusual and little-known solution to a problem, offered in deceptive and misleading advertising on the Internet."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "deceptive",
          "deceptive"
        ],
        [
          "misleading",
          "misleading"
        ],
        [
          "advertising",
          "advertising"
        ],
        [
          "Internet",
          "Internet"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal) A supposed unusual and little-known solution to a problem, offered in deceptive and misleading advertising on the Internet."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "one weird trick"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "one weird trick"
}

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.