Word.ws English Dictionary

rubberneck

/ˈɹʌbɚˌnɛk/

rubberneck noun: someone who engages in rubbernecking, or turning and staring.

Noun

rubberneck (plural rubbernecks)

  1. Someone who engages in rubbernecking, or turning and staring.
    • The uniformed man pointed up at the rubbernecks on the end of the pier.1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, →ISBN, page 46
    • We must have looked gorgeous. And what made it worse, there was at least a hundred rubbernecks that didn't have anything better to do than stand around and watch everyone falling all over themselves.1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, chapter 17, in The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 168
    Synonyms:
    rubbernecker
  2. (US, obsolete) A tourist.
  3. Someone or something with a flexible neck.
    • A suitable washer B1 and rubberneck B2, both of well known description, are provided to form with clapper arm B3 a watertight joint...1912, Edward C. Wood, Electrically Operated Bell for Submarine Signaling http://www.google.com/patents?id=p51jAAAAEBAJ, US Patent 1186961, line 57
    • “‘Hi, rubberneck!’ — he clutched at her pear-like breast jutting from her sweater — ‘how long did you think you'll duck me?’”1972, Can Themba, The Will to Die, page 59

Verb

rubberneck (third-person singular simple present rubbernecks, present participle rubbernecking, simple past and past participle rubbernecked)

  1. (transitive) To watch by craning the neck (as though it were made of rubber), especially if the observer and observed are in motion relative to each other.
    • The driver was so busy rubbernecking, trying to get a good view of the accident, that he was almost part of another accident.
  2. (transitive) To cause (someone) to watch in fascinated horror, as if rubbernecking to see a roadside accident.
    • Hoover’s books go down like a T.M.I. Facebook confessional, rubbernecking you in from the first sentence. Certain patterns quickly emerge.2023 July 6, Pamela Paul, “What’s the Story With Colleen Hoover?”, in The New York Times

Synonyms of rubberneck

Forms of rubberneck

Noun
pluralrubbernecks
Verb
third-person singular presentrubbernecks
present participlerubbernecking
past participlerubbernecked
pastrubbernecked

Origin of rubberneck

From rubber + neck. Coined in the sense of "tourist" in the United States in the late 19th century. A favored Americanism of H.L. Mencken.

Words formed from rubberneck

Phrases with rubberneck

Questions about rubberneck

What does rubberneck mean?
Rubberneck means someone who engages in rubbernecking, or turning and staring.
What part of speech is rubberneck?
Rubberneck can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce rubberneck?
Rubberneck is pronounced /ˈɹʌbɚˌnɛk/ (US).
What is the plural of rubberneck?
The plural of rubberneck is rubbernecks.

Words near rubberneck in the dictionary

  1. rubberizers
  2. rubberizes
  3. rubberizing
  4. rubberless
  5. rubberlike
  6. rubberneck
  7. rubberneck bus
  8. rubberneck buses
  9. rubberneck busses
  10. rubbernecked
  11. rubbernecker

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rubberneck (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Neøn-rubberneck.wav.

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