Word.ws English Dictionary

namedropping

namedropping is the present participle and gerund of namedrop.

namedropping is the alternative form of name-dropping.

Meaning of namedrop

Noun

namedrop (plural namedrops)

  1. An instance of name-dropping.
    • [Adam Gopnik] moves in the kind of circles that allow him to drop casual lines into conversation such as: “As John Updike once said to me …”, although he has the nervy Jewish self-consciousness to follow that with “… if you’ll forgive the namedrop.”2017 December 8, Hadley Freeman, “Adam Gopnik: ‘You’re waltzing along and suddenly you’re portrayed as a monster of privilege’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Meaning of name-dropping

Noun

name-dropping (countable and uncountable, plural name-droppings)

  1. The practice of casually mentioning famous or important people or the titles of their works, subtly implying familiarity or association, in order to impress others.
    • “The one thing I don't want anybody to do, the one thing I will not tolerate, is name-dropping. It's bad. Marlon Brando told me that.”1997, Chris Chase, Name Dropping, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 14
    Synonyms:
    name-checking

Forms of namedropping

pluralnamedroppings

Questions about namedropping

What is namedropping the present participle and gerund of?
Namedropping is the present participle and gerund of namedrop.

Words near namedropping in the dictionary

  1. namedness
  2. namedrop
  3. namedropped
  4. namedropper
  5. namedroppers
  6. namedropping
  7. namedroppings
  8. namedrops
  9. namedst
  10. namee
  11. namees

Source and license

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