Word.ws English Dictionary

nodding acquaintance

nodding acquaintance noun: a casual or partial familiarity; a relationship which is not close or fully developed; an inexact understanding (of something).

Noun

nodding acquaintance (plural nodding acquaintances)

  1. (idiomatic, usually) A casual or partial familiarity; a relationship which is not close or fully developed; an inexact understanding (of something).
    • None of the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a nodding acquaintance with them.1857, Wilkie Collins, chapter 5, in The Queen of Hearts
    • There isn't any doubt but that he had a nodding acquaintance with every pretty girl in town.1910, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter 10, in The Fortune Hunter
  2. (idiomatic) Someone who is a remote or passing acquaintance.
    • [T]o reach Cattewater I must either fetch a circuit through purlieus where every householder knew me and every urchin was a nodding acquaintance, or make a straight dash.1903, Arthur Quiller-Couch, chapter 8, in The Adventures of Harry Revel
    • He could not treat this scandalous matter in his own office. . . . Who was there he could go to? Linkman and Laver in Budge Row, perhaps—reliable, not too conspicuous, only nodding acquaintances.1922, John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, part 3, ch. 5

Examples of nodding acquaintance in a sentence

  • A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.2004 July 12, Bob Herbert, “Opinion: The Real Enemy Staring Us in the Face”, in New York Times, retrieved 08 May 2013:
  • [S]he knows only two of them as nodding acquaintances, and has never spoken to them privately.2011 May 21, “Race-rigging scandal: We'll clear our names”, in Daily Mirror, UK, retrieved 09 May 2013:

Forms of nodding acquaintance

pluralnodding acquaintances

Questions about nodding acquaintance

What does nodding acquaintance mean?
Nodding acquaintance means a casual or partial familiarity; a relationship which is not close or fully developed; an inexact understanding (of something).
How do you use nodding acquaintance in a sentence?
A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.
What part of speech is nodding acquaintance?
Nodding acquaintance is a noun.
What is the plural of nodding acquaintance?
The plural of nodding acquaintance is nodding acquaintances.

Words near nodding acquaintance in the dictionary

  1. noddifies
  2. noddify
  3. noddifying
  4. noddin'
  5. nodding
  6. nodding acquaintance
  7. nodding acquaintances
  8. nodding blue lilies
  9. nodding blue lily
  10. nodding disease
  11. nodding donkey

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nodding acquaintance (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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