Word.ws English Dictionary

Gordon Bennett

Gordon Bennett interjection: expression of surprise, contempt, outrage, disgust, frustration.

Interjection

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK) expression of surprise, contempt, outrage, disgust, frustration.

Synonyms of Gordon Bennett

Origin of Gordon Bennett

For James Gordon Bennett, Jr., a New York newspaper proprietor and playboy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who became widely known for his extravagant lifestyle and shocking behaviour. The first time the expression appears in print was in 1937, in James Curtis's novel, You’re in the Racket, Too. The Oxford English Dictionary places the phrase in the 1890s as an alteration of gorblimey and again in reference to James Gordon Bennett Jr. The name was probably chosen because the first syllable of Gordon sounds like God in non-rhotic pronunciations, which would make this a minced oath.

Questions about Gordon Bennett

What does Gordon Bennett mean?
Gordon Bennett means expression of surprise, contempt, outrage, disgust, frustration.
What part of speech is Gordon Bennett?
Gordon Bennett is an interjection.

Words near Gordon Bennett in the dictionary

  1. Gordius
  2. Gordo
  3. gordolobo
  4. gordolobos
  5. Gordon
  6. Gordon Bennett
  7. Gordon County
  8. Gordon Hill
  9. Gordon setter
  10. Gordon setters
  11. Gordon syndrome

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Gordon Bennett (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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