"snollygoster" meaning in English

See snollygoster in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: snollygosters [plural]
Etymology: 19th-century American English. Possibly from snallygaster, a mythical beast that preys on poultry and children; possibly from Pennsylvania German schnelle geeschter, from German schnell (“quick”) + Geist (“spirit”). Largely obsolete, it briefly resurfaced in 2009 in Britain as part of a debate over MPs' expenses. Etymology templates: {{der|en|pdc||schnelle geeschter}} Pennsylvania German schnelle geeschter Head templates: {{en-noun}} snollygoster (plural snollygosters)
  1. (slang, obsolete) A shrewd person not guided by principles, especially a politician. Tags: obsolete, slang Categories (topical): People Translations (shrewd person not guided by principles): ずる賢い人(ずるがしこいひと (Japanese), zurugashikoi hito) (Japanese)

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for snollygoster meaning in English (2.7kB)

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  "etymology_text": "19th-century American English. Possibly from snallygaster, a mythical beast that preys on poultry and children; possibly from Pennsylvania German schnelle geeschter, from German schnell (“quick”) + Geist (“spirit”).\nLargely obsolete, it briefly resurfaced in 2009 in Britain as part of a debate over MPs' expenses.",
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          "ref": "2009 May 19, “Tory issues apology after calling Labour rival a \"c***\"”, in Mirror, retrieved 2014-02-06",
          "text": "[…]I called for him to publish his expenses so that all Gloucester voters could see that he isn't a snollygoster[…]",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "[2021 May 12, The Hon. Siobhain McDonagh MP, “Fairness at Work and Power in Communities”, in parliamentary debates (Commons Chamber), volume 712, retrieved 2021-05-13",
          "text": "[…] I recently discovered the word “snollygoster”: not a character from “Harry Potter”, but an unprincipled person in office motivated by personal rather than public gain.]",
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        "(slang, obsolete) A shrewd person not guided by principles, especially a politician."
      ],
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          "code": "ja",
          "lang": "Japanese",
          "sense": "shrewd person not guided by principles",
          "word": "ずる賢い人(ずるがしこいひと"
        },
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          "code": "ja",
          "lang": "Japanese",
          "sense": "shrewd person not guided by principles",
          "word": "zurugashikoi hito)"
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        "(slang, obsolete) A shrewd person not guided by principles, especially a politician."
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    {
      "code": "ja",
      "lang": "Japanese",
      "sense": "shrewd person not guided by principles",
      "word": "ずる賢い人(ずるがしこいひと"
    },
    {
      "code": "ja",
      "lang": "Japanese",
      "sense": "shrewd person not guided by principles",
      "word": "zurugashikoi hito)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "snollygoster"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-06-04 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (e9e0a99 and db5a844). 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.