Wizard of Oz

Noun

Wizard of Oz (plural Wizards of Oz)

1. A person, believed to have magical powers because of awe-inspiring displays, but, as ultimately revealed, ordinary.
   • Nevertheless, as a great and terrible being, the Kafkan patriarch is in fact more like the Wizard of Oz than the Lord God of Israel. The dread-inspiring aura with which the father surrounds himself is based not on power and glory, but on bluff and bravado.1999, Raymond Armstrong, Kafka and Pinter Shadow-Boxing: The Struggle between Father and Son, Macmillan Press Ltd, →ISBN, page 163
   • I'm not one of these people that say, “Listen, we should bow down to the Wizard of Oz ’cause we don’t know what’s going on behind that curtain.”2006 October 25, Joe Scarborough, interview with Bill Mahar, Scarborough Country, MSNBC
2. (attributive, usually) A person simulating the operation of a supposed intelligent device, usually in an experiment.
   • The goal of Neimo is to provide designers with a "Wizard of Oz" environment to observe and evaluate how users interact with multimodal interfaces.1992, Wayne D. Gray, William E. Hefley, Dianne Murray, “NEIMO, A MULTIMODAL WIZARD OF OZ PLATFORM”, in Proceedings of the 1993 International Workshop on ..., page 204
   • Once a preliminary application design is complete, a wizard-of-oz study can help test and refine the interface.2006, E. K. Brown, Anne Anderson, Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, volume 11, page 769