Word.ws English Dictionary

Bunburying

Bunburying noun: avoiding one's duties and responsibilities by claiming to have appointments to see a fictitious person.

Noun

Bunburying (uncountable)

  1. (humorous) Avoiding one's duties and responsibilities by claiming to have appointments to see a fictitious person.
    • Besides, now that I know you to be a confirmed Bunburyist I naturally want to talk to you about Bunburying. I want to tell you the rules.1895, Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest […] , [Act I]
    • This financial "Bunburying" solves the problem of how to let banking organizations make high yield investments in order to improve overall earnings without risking the kind of public opposition, and loss of public confidence in banks, that took place in the 1930s [...]1991, Helen A. Garten, Why Bank Regulation Failed: Designing a Bank Regulatory Strategy for the 1990s

Examples of Bunburying in a sentence

  • Alison frequently went Bunburying in London although she called it Networking.1994, Susan B. Kelly, Time of Hope:
  • James and Louise Forsyth owned a country house "older than Shakespeare's" in Haywards Heath, Sussex; there Owen spent three days stroking the pet sheep and admiring the view, Bunburying at its best.1995, James Hatch, Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One:

Origin of Bunburying

From Bunbury + -ing, coined by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) after Bunbury, the fictitious disabled friend of the character Algernon whose supposed illness is used as an excuse to avoid social engagements.

Questions about Bunburying

What does Bunburying mean?
Bunburying means avoiding one's duties and responsibilities by claiming to have appointments to see a fictitious person.
How do you use Bunburying in a sentence?
Alison frequently went Bunburying in London although she called it Networking.
What part of speech is Bunburying?
Bunburying is a noun.

Words near Bunburying in the dictionary

  1. bunbun
  2. bunbuns
  3. Bunburied
  4. Bunburies
  5. Bunbury
  6. Bunburying
  7. Bunburyist
  8. bunce
  9. bunced
  10. bunces
  11. bunch

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Bunburying (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: “Bunburying.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bunburying. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.