Word.ws English Dictionary

Lake Wobegon

Lake Wobegon noun: an idealized, close-knit small-town community.

Noun

Lake Wobegon (plural Lake Wobegons)

  1. (US, figuratively) An idealized, close-knit small-town community.
    • There, in a setting suspiciously similar to Lake Wobegon, I’ve chronicled the feats of the incomparable John Gagliardi, head coach at Division III powerhouse St. John’s.2009, Austin Murphy, Saturday Rules: Why College Football Outpasses, Outclasses, and Flat-Out Surpasses the NFL, page 5
  2. (US, figuratively) A situation in which everyone is thought to be above average or exceptionally successful.
    • Home to an elite university, this exclusive enclave in central New Jersey was known for its appealing colonial architecture, skyrocketing real estate prices, and high SAT scores among its above-average public and private school population—Lake Wobegon had nothing on Grantham.2004, Tracy Kelleher, It’s All About Eve...
    • Leftists seem to live in a Lake Wobegon world where everyone is above average and they cannot understand that in any numerical distribution there is always a bottom 10 percent and a top 10 percent—yes, and even a top and bottom one percent.2019, Anthony Walsh, chapter 8, in A Nation Divided: The Conflicting Personalities, Visions, and Values of Liberals and Conservatives, page 86

Forms of Lake Wobegon

pluralLake Wobegons

Origin of Lake Wobegon

From the name of the fictional town Lake Wobegon, created by Garrison Keillor as the setting of the recurring segment “News from Lake Wobegon” for the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, aired live from 1974 to 2016 from Saint Paul, Minnesota. The figurative senses derive from recurrent elements of the monologue, specifically “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve” and “Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”.

Words formed from Lake Wobegon

Questions about Lake Wobegon

What does Lake Wobegon mean?
Lake Wobegon means an idealized, close-knit small-town community.
What part of speech is Lake Wobegon?
Lake Wobegon is a noun.
What is the plural of Lake Wobegon?
The plural of Lake Wobegon is Lake Wobegons.

Words near Lake Wobegon in the dictionary

  1. Lake Wilson
  2. Lake Winnipeg
  3. Lake Winnipeg physa
  4. Lake Winnipeg physae
  5. Lake Winnipeg physas
  6. Lake Wobegon
  7. Lake Wobegon effect
  8. Lake Wobegon effects
  9. Lake Wongan
  10. Lake Worth
  11. Lake Worth Beach

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Lake Wobegon (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: “Lake Wobegon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lake_wobegon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.