Word.ws English Dictionary

sardoodledom

/sɑː(ɹ)ˈduːdəldəm/

sardoodledom noun: well-made works of drama that have trivial, insignificant, or melodramatic plots.

Noun (1)

sardoodledom (uncountable)

  1. (uncommon) Well-made works of drama that have trivial, insignificant, or melodramatic plots.
    • Naturally this critic loses no chance to express his contempt for what he calls “Sardoodledom:” the cult of the “wellmade” play. He gives M. Sardou no bail, and barely allows Mr. Pinero to go at large on good behavior.[1907 April, H. W. Boynton, “Mr. Shaw as Critic”, in The Atlantic
    • What is new is that we have in movies an art form so exclusively given over to Sardoodledom that a Yale professor thinks that Sardoodledom is ingrained in the celluloid.2010 [1946], Eric Bentley, The Playwright as a Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times, 4th edition, University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN, page 34

Noun (2) capitalized: Sardoodledom

Sardoodledom (uncountable)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of sardoodledom.

Forms of sardoodledom

alternative formSardoodledom

Origin of sardoodledom

Blend of Sardou + doodle + -dom, named after French dramatist Victorien Sardou. Coined by Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist George Bernard Shaw who first used it on the 1 June, 1895 in the Saturday Review when criticising Sardou's well-made plays.

Questions about sardoodledom

What does sardoodledom mean?
Sardoodledom means well-made works of drama that have trivial, insignificant, or melodramatic plots.
What part of speech is sardoodledom?
Sardoodledom is a noun.
How do you pronounce sardoodledom?
Sardoodledom is pronounced /sɑː(ɹ)ˈduːdəldəm/.

Words near sardoodledom in the dictionary

  1. sardonicism
  2. sardonicisms
  3. sardonicity
  4. sardonyx
  5. sardonyxes
  6. sardoodledom
  7. Sardos
  8. Sardou
  9. sards
  10. sare
  11. saredutant

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sardoodledom (page history and authors); Sardoodledom (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-sardoodledom.wav.

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