hoddydoddy
hoddydoddy noun: an awkward or foolish person.
Noun
hoddydoddy (plural hoddydoddies)
- An awkward or foolish person.
- Well, good wife bawd, Cob’s wife, and you / That make your husband such a hoddy-doddy; / And you, young apple-squire, and old cuckold-maker1598, Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, act IV, scene viii
- Name my accuſer ſaith he, or I defye thee Kemp at the quart ſtaffe. I told him, & all his anger turned to laughter: ſwearing it did him good to haue ill words of a hoddy doddy, a habber de hoy, a chicken, a ſquib, a ſquall: […]1600, William Kempe, Kemps nine daies vvonder
- A snail or its shell.
- A River snail in Oxfordshire is “Hoddy-doddy”; in Northamptonshire the Wall snail is “Packman snail.”1899, W.T. Fernie, Animal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure, page 448
Forms of hoddydoddy
| plural | hoddydoddies |
|---|
Origin of hoddydoddy
From hoddy-dod, an obsolete English regionalism meaning “periwinkle” or “snail”. Compare dodman.
Questions about hoddydoddy
- What does hoddydoddy mean?
- Hoddydoddy means an awkward or foolish person.
- What part of speech is hoddydoddy?
- Hoddydoddy is a noun.
- What is the plural of hoddydoddy?
- The plural of hoddydoddy is hoddydoddies.
Words near hoddydoddy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hoddydoddy (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “hoddydoddy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hoddydoddy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.