Word.ws English Dictionary

Sir Humphreys

Sir Humphreys is the plural of Sir Humphrey.

Meaning of Sir Humphrey

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

Questions about Sir Humphreys

What is Sir Humphreys the plural of?
Sir Humphreys is the plural of Sir Humphrey.

Words near Sir Humphreys in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Sir Humphreys (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

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