Word.ws English Dictionary

mouth-breather

mouth-breather is the alternative spelling of mouth breather.

Meaning of mouth breather

Noun

mouth breather (plural mouth breathers)

  1. A person who routinely inhales and exhales through the mouth, instead of through the nose.
    • Respirations cannot be recorded by this method, if the subject is a mouth breather (as no air flows by the thermistor in the nose).1967, Nancy J. Barron, “A Ride in the Human Centrifuge”, in American Journal of Nursing, volume 67, number 8, page 1654
  2. (derogatory, idiomatic, slang) A person who is boorish, stupid, or otherwise unattractive.
    • She's a philosophy major from Brown, now working retail at Niagara Falls, living in a trailer and working for a "mouth breather" of a boss.2004 March 12, Tim Goodman, “Trinkets are spirit guides in Fox's brilliant 'Wonderfalls'”, in San Francisco Chronicle, archived from the original on 20 Jan 2010

Forms of mouth-breather

pluralmouth-breathers

Questions about mouth-breather

What is mouth-breather the alternative spelling of?
Mouth-breather is the alternative spelling of mouth breather.

Words near mouth-breather in the dictionary

  1. mouth ulcers
  2. mouth wash
  3. mouth washes
  4. mouth-breathe
  5. mouth-breathed
  6. mouth-breather
  7. mouth-breathers
  8. mouth-breathes
  9. mouth-breathing
  10. mouth-filling
  11. mouth-footed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mouth-breather (page history and authors); mouth breather (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: “mouth-breather.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mouth-breather. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.