Word.ws English Dictionary

gazelle in the garden

gazelle in the garden noun: used during a meal to alert a family member or friend that they have a crumb on their face.

Noun

gazelle in the garden

  1. (colloquial, euphemistic) Used during a meal to alert a family member or friend that they have a crumb on their face.
    • The other ubiquitous anecdote, told by Harvard undergraduates who enjoyed poking gentle fun at the stately and aged Mrs. Fields, describes Annie saying "There's a gazelle in the garden" when she noticed food in her husband's beard at the dinner table.1990, Judith Roman, Annie Adams Fields: the spirit of Charles Street, page 12
    • If he got a crumb lodged in his beard, she would say, "Jamie, dear, there is a gazelle in the garden," which amused his friends and became a household expression in our family.1922, Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, Random memories, page 35

Synonyms of gazelle in the garden

Origin of gazelle in the garden

Possibly from an Arabic word that means both beard and garden.

Questions about gazelle in the garden

What does gazelle in the garden mean?
Gazelle in the garden means used during a meal to alert a family member or friend that they have a crumb on their face.
What part of speech is gazelle in the garden?
Gazelle in the garden is a noun.

Words near gazelle in the garden in the dictionary

  1. gazelessness
  2. Gazeley
  3. gazelle
  4. Gazelle Hound
  5. Gazelle Hounds
  6. gazelle in the garden
  7. gazelle on the lawn
  8. gazelled
  9. gazellelike
  10. gazelles
  11. gazelline

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gazelle in the garden (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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