nutty as a fruitcake
nutty as a fruitcake adjective: behaving in an eccentric, foolish, or kooky manner; very nutty.
Adjective
nutty as a fruitcake (not comparable)
- Behaving in an eccentric, foolish, or kooky manner; very nutty.
- ... and assuming that the defendant's Aunt Jane, in Wilkes-Barre, was as nutty as a fruitcake, and his grandfather, in Oskaloosa, had to wear cotton in his ears ...1912, G. Graham (publisher), The Saturday Evening Post - Volume 185, Part 1, page 10
- Eugene O'Neill, in his 1914 play, The Movie Man, coined a memorable simile: "We sure are as nutty as a fruitcake or we wouldn't be here."2003, William Safire / NY Times News Service, "Fruitcake: A word that gets the US Congress to call the cops", Taipei Times, 10 Aug, p. 9
Synonyms of nutty as a fruitcake
Forms of nutty as a fruitcake
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Origin of nutty as a fruitcake
First use appears c. 1911 or 1912. See cite below.
Questions about nutty as a fruitcake
- What does nutty as a fruitcake mean?
- Nutty as a fruitcake means behaving in an eccentric, foolish, or kooky manner; very nutty.
- What part of speech is nutty as a fruitcake?
- Nutty as a fruitcake is an adjective.
Words near nutty as a fruitcake in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: nutty as a fruitcake (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-nutty as a fruitcake.ogg.
Cite this entry: “nutty as a fruitcake.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nutty_as_a_fruitcake. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.