Heath Robinson
Heath Robinson noun: anything ingenious (and often complex) but absurdly impractical or even useless.
Noun
Heath Robinson (plural Heath Robinsons)
- Anything ingenious (and often complex) but absurdly impractical or even useless.
- Among the many Heath Robinson contraptions he devised were the Light Vessels (the Sun and the Moon) which would ferry the rescued Light-Particles back to their land of origin along the Milky Way.1998, Samuel Lieu, Manichaeism in Central Asia and China, →ISBN, page 16
- And that is how we came to mow our lake weed, although we eventually found it easier to tie two ropes, one to each side of the inner tube, and to pull the Heath Robinson contraption back and forwards across the water with Chris and I standing on opposite banks, each holding one of the lines.2014, Ivan M. Donaldson, The Truant from Medicine: A Memoir, →ISBN
Forms of Heath Robinson
| plural | Heath Robinsons |
|---|
Origin of Heath Robinson
In reference to the drawings by William Heath Robinson.
Questions about Heath Robinson
- What does Heath Robinson mean?
- Heath Robinson means anything ingenious (and often complex) but absurdly impractical or even useless.
- What part of speech is Heath Robinson?
- Heath Robinson is a noun.
- What is the plural of Heath Robinson?
- The plural of Heath Robinson is Heath Robinsons.
Words near Heath Robinson in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Heath Robinson (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: “Heath Robinson.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/heath_robinson. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.