Word.ws English Dictionary

oniony

/ˈʌnjəni/

oniony adjective: resembling an onion or onions, especially in terms of smell.

Adjective (1)

oniony (comparative onionier, superlative onioniest)

  1. Resembling an onion or onions, especially in terms of smell.
    • The leaves of the Salad leek possess a somewhat oniony taste and smell, and are extensively eaten raw as a relish.1910, George P. Foaden, F. Fletcher, editors, Text-Book of Egyptian Agriculture, Cairo: National Printing Department, page 545
  2. Flavoured with onions.
    • No more will the messenger boy, the rounder, or the girl about town be able to indulge in the oniony hamburger, the last year’s chicken sandwich, or any of the other edibles and indigestibles furnished by the wheeled commissaries.1900 May 17, “All Night Lunch Wagons. Proposed City Law With a Tax of $100 Each Will Drive Them Away.”, in Evening World-Herald, Omaha, Neb., page 7, column 3
    • In a cool, colonial dining room overlooking the Malacca river, he demonstrates three such recipes: a mellow, mushroomy chicken curry (ayam pong the), a fiery okra salad (sambal bendeh), and – a personal favourite – a spicy, oniony shrimp-paste omelette (cincalock omelette).2010 October 13, Alice-Azania Jarvis, “Fancy a Malaysian?”, in The Independent, number 7,489, page 44
    Synonyms:
    onioned
  3. Resembling or characteristic of the satirical news website The Onion.
    • Many of these submissions were deleted for not having “an oniony quality” (seeming more like satire than news, not just a funny title) or being from an unreliable news source.2019 January 29, Dawn Graham, “Fake news or not? Using natural language processing to identify articles”, in Towards Data Science, archived from the original on 11 Dec 2021
    • ... it only took a little while for someone to point out this distinctly Oniony headline which appeared on the FARS^([sic]) website recently. "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama." Well, it turns out the headline and full article were pulled from The Onion and ran as a FARS news...2012 September, Marco Werman, “Iranian News Agency Apologizes for Reprinting Onion Satire as Fact”, in The World

Adjective (2) capitalized: Oniony

Oniony (comparative more Oniony, superlative most Oniony)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of oniony (“resembling the satirical news website The Onion”).

Synonyms of oniony

Forms of oniony

comparativeonionier
superlativeonioniest
alternative formonion-y
comparativemore Oniony
superlativemost Oniony

Origin of oniony

From onion + -y. In sense 3, after the mock news outlet The Onion.

Words formed from oniony

Questions about oniony

What does oniony mean?
Oniony means resembling an onion or onions, especially in terms of smell.
What part of speech is oniony?
Oniony is an adjective.
How do you pronounce oniony?
Oniony is pronounced /ˈʌnjəni/.

Words near oniony in the dictionary

  1. onionskins
  2. oniontini
  3. oniontinis
  4. onionweed
  5. onionwood
  6. oniony
  7. oniric
  8. onirocritic
  9. onirocritics
  10. onis
  11. oniscid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: oniony (page history and authors); Oniony (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-oniony.wav.

Cite this entry: “oniony.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/oniony. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.