Word.ws English Dictionary

Sir Humphrey

Sir Humphrey noun: a high-ranking bureaucrat, particularly one who is elitist and deliberately obscure.

Noun

Sir Humphrey (plural Sir Humphreys)

  1. (UK) A high-ranking bureaucrat, particularly one who is elitist and deliberately obscure.
    • Wanted: a Sir Humphrey for funds to hide behind
      [...]
      Key skills required:
      — Ability to move head vertically rather than horizontally when asked to promote anything desired by the fund management companies who pay your salary
      — Ability to confuse fact with fiction via misleading random statistics...2012 May 22, Simon English, “Wanted: a Sir Humphrey for funds to hide behind”, in The London Evening Standard
    • Among the most senior honours, the dominance of Sir Humphreys and courtiers is striking. There are gongs galore for the deputy director of this Whitehall department and the head of strategy group at that one, to say nothing of the pile of baubles handed to those who serve the Windsors.2013 December 31, Jonathan Freedland, “New Year honours should reward achievement, not cronyism”, in The Guardian

Forms of Sir Humphrey

pluralSir Humphreys

Origin of Sir Humphrey

From the fictional character Sir Humphrey Appleby, a self-important, Oxford-educated civil servant first depicted in the 1980 premiere of the BBC television series Yes Minister.

Questions about Sir Humphrey

What does Sir Humphrey mean?
Sir Humphrey means a high-ranking bureaucrat, particularly one who is elitist and deliberately obscure.
What part of speech is Sir Humphrey?
Sir Humphrey is a noun.
What is the plural of Sir Humphrey?
The plural of Sir Humphrey is Sir Humphreys.

Words near Sir Humphrey in the dictionary

  1. sir
  2. Sir David's long-beaked echidna
  3. Sir David's long-beaked echidnae
  4. Sir David's long-beaked echidnas
  5. Sir Francis Drake Channel
  6. Sir Humphrey
  7. Sir Humphreys
  8. Sir John
  9. Sir John Lack-Latin
  10. Sir John Lack-Latins
  11. Sir Johns

Source and license

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