Word.ws English Dictionary

person from Porlock

person from Porlock noun: one whose inconvenient interruption prevents the completion of something important.

Noun

person from Porlock (plural persons from Porlock or people from Porlock)

  1. (idiomatic) One whose inconvenient interruption prevents the completion of something important.

Synonyms of person from Porlock

Forms of person from Porlock

pluralpersons from Porlock
pluralpeople from Porlock

Origin of person from Porlock

In reference to an unwelcome visitor described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as interrupting him during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797, and preventing its completion.

Questions about person from Porlock

What does person from Porlock mean?
Person from Porlock means one whose inconvenient interruption prevents the completion of something important.
What part of speech is person from Porlock?
Person from Porlock is a noun.
What is the plural of person from Porlock?
The plural of person from Porlock is persons from Porlock.

Words near person from Porlock in the dictionary

  1. Perso-Arabic
  2. Persoid
  3. person
  4. Person County
  5. person deprived of liberty
  6. person from Porlock
  7. person having ordinary skill in the art
  8. person in the street
  9. person in the streets
  10. person of interest
  11. person of ordinary skill in the art

Source and license

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