Word.ws English Dictionary

pencil-necked

pencil-necked adjective: having a very thin neck.

Adjective

pencil-necked (comparative more pencil-necked, superlative most pencil-necked)

  1. Having a very thin neck.
  2. (US, derogatory, idiomatic) Insubstantial; weak.
    • That pencil-necked geek isn't going to stop me.
    • Science fiction is more than inelegant prose for pencil-necked teenagers.1997 July 7, Zina Moukheiber, “The geeks have inherited the earth”, in Forbes, →ISSN, page 348

Forms of pencil-necked

comparativemore pencil-necked
superlativemost pencil-necked

Questions about pencil-necked

What does pencil-necked mean?
Pencil-necked means having a very thin neck.
What part of speech is pencil-necked?
Pencil-necked is an adjective.

Words near pencil-necked in the dictionary

  1. pencil-blue
  2. pencil-blues
  3. pencil-holder
  4. pencil-holders
  5. pencil-neck
  6. pencil-necked
  7. pencil-necks
  8. pencil-post bed
  9. pencil-post beds
  10. pencil-pusher
  11. pencil-pushers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pencil-necked (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-pencil-necked.ogg.

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