Word.ws English Dictionary

one-liner

one-liner noun: a short joke, especially one of a single sentence.

Noun

one-liner (plural one-liners)

  1. A short joke, especially one of a single sentence.
    • witty one-liners
    • ALMOST without exception, Moore’s narrators have comic yet dark stories to tell: they fire off crisp, De Vriesian one-liners and then, when you least expect it, sneak in wrenching revelations.1994 October 3, Lorrie Moore, “Briefly Noted”, in The New Yorker, New York, N.Y.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 17 Mar 2026
  2. A short remark intended as a sound bite.
  3. A command or small program consisting of a single line of input.
  4. A chat feature on a bulletin board system or web page where users can post a single line of text at a time.

Forms of one-liner

pluralone-liners
alternative formone liner

Origin of one-liner

From one + line + -er.

Questions about one-liner

What does one-liner mean?
One-liner means a short joke, especially one of a single sentence.
What part of speech is one-liner?
One-liner is a noun.
What is the plural of one-liner?
The plural of one-liner is one-liners.

Words near one-liner in the dictionary

  1. one-leggeds
  2. one-line skies
  3. one-line sky
  4. one-line whip
  5. one-line whips
  6. one-liner
  7. one-liners
  8. one-man
  9. one-man advantage
  10. one-man army
  11. one-man band

Source and license

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