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Humpty Dumptyism

Humpty Dumptyism noun: the practice of insisting that a word means whatever one wishes it to.

Noun

Humpty Dumptyism (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) The practice of insisting that a word means whatever one wishes it to.
    • "It seems to be saying one or both of two things. One is that any score that comes out of any procedure that purports to measure intelligence is a value of the scale, intelligence. If so, this would be Humpty Dumptyism."2003, J. A. Keats, Norman Cliff, Ordinal Measurement in the Behavioral Sciences, page 31

Forms of Humpty Dumptyism

alternative formHumpty-Dumptyism

Origin of Humpty Dumptyism

From Humpty Dumpty + -ism, after the fictional character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who, when asked what he means by glory, replies, "I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" Alice protests that this isn't the meaning of glory and Humpty Dumpty replies, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean——neither more nor less."

Questions about Humpty Dumptyism

What does Humpty Dumptyism mean?
Humpty Dumptyism means the practice of insisting that a word means whatever one wishes it to.
What part of speech is Humpty Dumptyism?
Humpty Dumptyism is a noun.

Words near Humpty Dumptyism in the dictionary

  1. humpty
  2. Humpty Dumpty
  3. Humpty Dumpty word
  4. Humpty Dumpty words
  5. Humpty Dumptyish
  6. Humpty Dumptyism
  7. humpty-dumpties
  8. humpty-dumpty
  9. Humpty-Dumptyish
  10. Humpty-Dumptyism
  11. humpy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Humpty Dumptyism (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-Humpty Dumptyism.ogg.

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