Word.ws English Dictionary

paddywhackery

paddywhackery noun: a stereotyped portrayal of Irish people as garrulous, unreliable, alcoholic, etc., once common in plays.

Noun

paddywhackery (uncountable)

  1. A stereotyped portrayal of Irish people as garrulous, unreliable, alcoholic, etc., once common in plays.
    • In the pub they found an empty table. The barman's accent was from Dublin and the place was filled with Irish junk from the 1950s. Opposite them, a wall of Guinness adverts. Calendars of Irish writers. Railway posters with Irish paintings. Pictures of overnight boat crossings from Belfast to...2017, Bernard MacLaverty, chapter 2, in Midwinter Break, page 26

Origin of paddywhackery

From paddywhack + -ery.

Questions about paddywhackery

What does paddywhackery mean?
Paddywhackery means a stereotyped portrayal of Irish people as garrulous, unreliable, alcoholic, etc., once common in plays.
What part of speech is paddywhackery?
Paddywhackery is a noun.

Words near paddywhackery in the dictionary

  1. paddywaggons
  2. paddywagon
  3. paddywagons
  4. paddywhack
  5. paddywhacked
  6. paddywhackery
  7. paddywhacking
  8. paddywhacks
  9. padek
  10. padel
  11. padel tennis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paddywhackery (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:

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