Word.ws English Dictionary

poncif

poncif noun: an unoriginal or uninspired idea; a cliché.

Noun

poncif (plural poncifs)

  1. (literary, rare) An unoriginal or uninspired idea; a cliché.
    • This hope is based on an optimistic view that human beings are capable of understanding their culture, naïvely, if their minds have not been corrupted by the poncifs of fashion, the superficiality of the juste-milieu, or the kind of art which falsifies the conditions of life.1999 July 29, J. A. Hiddleston, “Language and Rhetoric”, in Baudelaire and the Art of Memory, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 274

Forms of poncif

pluralponcifs

Origin of poncif

Borrowed from French poncif (“cliché, stereotype”), from French poncif (“stencil”), from poncer (“to copy with pouncing paper”) + -if, from ponce (“pumice”) + -er, from Late Latin pōmex (“pumice”), from Latin pūmex (“pumice”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)poH(y)- (“foam”).

Questions about poncif

What does poncif mean?
Poncif means an unoriginal or uninspired idea; a cliché.
What part of speech is poncif?
Poncif is a noun.
What is the plural of poncif?
The plural of poncif is poncifs.

Words near poncif in the dictionary

  1. Ponciano
  2. Poncianos
  3. Ponciau
  4. poncier
  5. ponciest
  6. poncif
  7. poncified
  8. poncifs
  9. poncily
  10. ponciness
  11. poncing

Source and license

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