Word.ws English Dictionary

brillig

brillig noun: a nonce word in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, explained by Humpty Dumpty as "four o'clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.".

Noun

brillig (uncountable)

  1. A nonce word in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, explained by Humpty Dumpty as "four o'clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin broiling things for dinner."
    • 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe1871, Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

Origin of brillig

Supposedly from bryl or broil.

Questions about brillig

What does brillig mean?
Brillig means a nonce word in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, explained by Humpty Dumpty as "four o'clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.".
What part of speech is brillig?
Brillig is a noun.

Words near brillig in the dictionary

  1. brillianting
  2. brilliantining
  3. brilliantly
  4. brilliantness
  5. brilliants
  6. brillig
  7. brilliolet
  8. brilliolets
  9. brilliolette
  10. brilliolettes
  11. brillo

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brillig (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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