Word.ws English Dictionary

pushmi-pullyu

pushmi-pullyu noun: a person who behaves in a conflicting or contradictory manner.

Noun

pushmi-pullyu (plural pushmi-pullyus)

  1. A person who behaves in a conflicting or contradictory manner.
    • This is the age of the Cry-Bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper. They are everywhere, these duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political2015 April 21, Julie Burchill, “Meet the Cry-Bully: a hideous hybrid of victim and victor”, in The Spectator

Adjective

pushmi-pullyu (not comparable)

  1. Conflicting or contradictory.
    • It's one of the most characteristic behavior patterns of human beings, this pushmepullyou approach to life. We say one thing and do another […]1998, B. J. Wylie, Enough: Lifestyle and Financial Planning for Simpler Living, Northstone Publishing
    • They don't want some sort of hopeless compromise, some perpetual pushme-pullyou arrangement in which we stay half-in and half-out in a political no man's land - with no more ministers round the table in Brussels and yet forced to obey EU laws.2018 June 20, The Independent
  2. in teleosemantics, being a representation with both indicative and imperative content.
    • What […] are the steps from […] the sort of inarticulate pushmi-pullyu comprehensions the bee has and the dim sort of pushmi-pullyu comprehension that mediates responses to behavior releasers, to articulate, well-differentiated, and uncommitted human beliefs and desires […]?2004, R. G. Millikan, “On Reading Signs: Some Differences Between Us and Others”, in D.K. Oller, U. Griebel, editors, Evolution of Communication Systems, MIT Press, page 22

Forms of pushmi-pullyu

pluralpushmi-pullyus
alternative formpushme-pullyou

Origin of pushmi-pullyu

From Pushmi-pullyu, the name of a fictional animal with two heads at opposing ends of its body, along with very sharp horns on each side of the head, in Hugh Lofting's The Story of Doctor Dolittle.

Questions about pushmi-pullyu

What does pushmi-pullyu mean?
Pushmi-pullyu means a person who behaves in a conflicting or contradictory manner.
What part of speech is pushmi-pullyu?
Pushmi-pullyu can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of pushmi-pullyu?
The plural of pushmi-pullyu is pushmi-pullyus.

Words near pushmi-pullyu in the dictionary

  1. Pushmataha
  2. Pushmataha County
  3. pushme-pullyou
  4. pushme-pullyous
  5. pushmepullyou
  6. pushmi-pullyu
  7. pushmi-pullyus
  8. pushmobile
  9. pushmobiles
  10. pushmow
  11. pushmowed

Source and license

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