Word.ws English Dictionary

bubbe meise

bubbe meise noun: an old wives' tale; a fairytale.

Noun

bubbe meise (plural bubbe meises)

  1. (Judaism) An old wives' tale; a fairytale.
    • If you look ahead to the second book of the Maccabees, you will see that Judah did not embrace the life of the tzaddik […] No, Judah discovered […] that war, not holiness, is good business. He spent the years after the Maccabean victory pillaging whatever small settlements happened to strike his...1988 December 4, Liz Galst, “Lesbian Maccabee Unmasked!”, in Gay Community News, volume 16, number 21, page 7

Forms of bubbe meise

pluralbubbe meises
alternative formbube meise

Origin of bubbe meise

Borrowed from Yiddish באָבע־מעשׂה (bobe-mayse).

Questions about bubbe meise

What does bubbe meise mean?
Bubbe meise means an old wives' tale; a fairytale.
What part of speech is bubbe meise?
Bubbe meise is a noun.
What is the plural of bubbe meise?
The plural of bubbe meise is bubbe meises.

Words near bubbe meise in the dictionary

  1. Bubba vote
  2. Bubba votes
  3. Bubbafication
  4. bubbas
  5. bubbe
  6. bubbe meise
  7. bubbe meises
  8. bubbe-meise
  9. bubbe-meises
  10. bubbed
  11. bubbeh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bubbe meise (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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Cite this entry: “bubbe meise.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bubbe_meise. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.