Word.ws English Dictionary

spoonerisms

spoonerisms is the plural of spoonerism.

Meaning of spoonerism

Noun

spoonerism (plural spoonerisms)

  1. (rhetoric) A play on words on a phrase in which the initial (usually consonantal) sounds of two or more of the main words are transposed.
    • Undergraduates at Oxford University were playfully fond of Spooner, whom they nicknamed "the Spoo". They also coined the term "spoonerism" around 1885, after Spooner had been a fellow at New College for almost twenty years. By 1892, his reputation for absentmindedness was well known; students came...2007, Michael Erard, Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, page 16
    Synonyms:
    marrowsky

Noun capitalized: Spoonerisms

Spoonerisms

  1. (plural) plural of Spoonerism

Questions about spoonerisms

What is spoonerisms the plural of?
Spoonerisms is the plural of spoonerism.
What part of speech is spoonerisms?
Spoonerisms is a noun.

Words near spoonerisms in the dictionary

  1. spooner
  2. Spooner Row
  3. spoonered
  4. spoonering
  5. spoonerism
  6. spoonerisms
  7. spooneristic
  8. spooneristically
  9. spoonerize
  10. spoonerized
  11. spoonerizes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spoonerisms (page history and authors); Spoonerisms (page history and authors); spoonerism (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: “spoonerisms.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/spoonerisms. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.