Word.ws English Dictionary

mean girl

mean girl noun: a girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying, especially at a high school.

Noun

mean girl (plural mean girls)

  1. (informal) A girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying, especially at a high school.
    • Before you know it, they're off to junior high. At this point, you start to kind of remember things from the times when you were there, especially the mean girl stuff.2008, Laura Ross, The Valley Girl Turns 40, page 110
    • When mean girls are protagonists, unlikability is used to provide complexity to their narration that reminds us of mean girl as person.2018 December 7, Mary Ann Harlan, The Girl-Positive Library: Inspiring Confidence, Creativity, and Curiosity in Young Women, ABC-CLIO, →ISBN, page 48

Forms of mean girl

pluralmean girls
alternative formmeangirl

Origin of mean girl

Popularized by the 2004 teen comedy film Mean Girls.

Questions about mean girl

What does mean girl mean?
Mean girl means a girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying, especially at a high school.
What part of speech is mean girl?
Mean girl is a noun.
What is the plural of mean girl?
The plural of mean girl is mean girls.

Words near mean girl in the dictionary

  1. mean everything to
  2. mean free path
  3. mean free paths
  4. mean free time
  5. mean free times
  6. mean girl
  7. mean girls
  8. mean hitting time
  9. mean hitting times
  10. mean lower low water
  11. mean machine

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mean girl (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: “mean girl.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mean_girl. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.