Word.ws English Dictionary

phedinkus

phedinkus noun: nonsense, malarkey.

Noun

phedinkus (uncountable)

  1. (nonce-word, obsolete, rare) Nonsense, malarkey
    • If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business. But I wish to say I never shed any of these tears personally, because I am...1935, Damon Runyon, “Tobias the Terrible”, collected in Money from home, Frederick A. Stokes company
    • Like yur Uncle Shen, or whatsis phedinkus name. Yur fightin a big street lummox who kicks.1994, Gus Lee, China boy: a novel

Origin of phedinkus

Coined 1935, by Damon Runyon. Phonology pseudo-Greek – note the ph. The term may be analyzed as *phe- + dinkus (“contrivance (slang)”), where the prefix is an optional consonant /f/, with the stressless vowel added in the same way as other mutually apophonic prefixes (when the consonant changes, the vowel changes accordingly) such as pi- (pizazz), she- (shebang), etc.

Questions about phedinkus

What does phedinkus mean?
Phedinkus means nonsense, malarkey.
What part of speech is phedinkus?
Phedinkus is a noun.

Words near phedinkus in the dictionary

  1. phebotomine
  2. Phebus
  3. Phecda
  4. phecode
  5. phecodes
  6. phedinkus
  7. phee-call
  8. phee-calls
  9. pheenom
  10. pheenoms
  11. pheep

Source and license

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