Word.ws English Dictionary

unsinkable rubber duck

unsinkable rubber duck noun: a belief in a supernatural or paranormal phenomenon that people continue to hold, in spite of it being debunked.

Noun

unsinkable rubber duck (plural unsinkable rubber ducks)

  1. A belief in a supernatural or paranormal phenomenon that people continue to hold, in spite of it being debunked.
    • Indeed, even if they are thoroughly examined and refuted in one age, they seem to reemerge within the next, and people will continue to believe them in spite of evidence to the contrary. This is what I have called the “unsinkable rubber duck” syndrome.2010, Paul Kurtz, Exuberant Skepticism, →ISBN, page 179
    • As a self-proclaimed “spokesman for rationality,” The Skeptical Inquirer documented every major gaffe made by Jeane Dixon (“the unsinkable rubber duck of prophecy”) and took special pleasure debunking SRI's Geller experiments.2011, Lawrence R Samuel, Supernatural America: A Cultural History, →ISBN, page 120

Forms of unsinkable rubber duck

pluralunsinkable rubber ducks

Origin of unsinkable rubber duck

Coined by James Randi, by analogy to the way a rubber duck will pop back up to the surface after being submerged.

Questions about unsinkable rubber duck

What does unsinkable rubber duck mean?
Unsinkable rubber duck means a belief in a supernatural or paranormal phenomenon that people continue to hold, in spite of it being debunked.
What part of speech is unsinkable rubber duck?
Unsinkable rubber duck is a noun.
What is the plural of unsinkable rubber duck?
The plural of unsinkable rubber duck is unsinkable rubber ducks.

Words near unsinkable rubber duck in the dictionary

  1. unsings
  2. unsingular
  3. unsinister
  4. unsinkability
  5. unsinkable
  6. unsinkable rubber duck
  7. unsinkable rubber ducks
  8. unsinkableness
  9. unsinkables
  10. unsinkably
  11. unsinking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unsinkable rubber duck (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)-Flame, not lame-unsinkable rubber duck.wav.

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