Word.ws English Dictionary

wonkish

wonkish adjective: nerdy; bookish; having the qualities of a wonk.

Adjective

wonkish (comparative more wonkish, superlative most wonkish)

  1. (informal) Nerdy; bookish; having the qualities of a wonk.
    • According to Greer, the voting classes were ready for someone very much like the wonkish Clinton, with his devotion to "the issues."1997, Edwin Diamond, Robert A. Silverman, White House to Your House, →ISBN, page 125
    • Hillary may have been too wonkish, and Palin not wonkish enough, but they have normalized white females as political candidates for the nation.2009, Zillah Eisenstein, The Audacity of Races and Genders, Zed Books, →ISBN, page 138
    Synonyms:
    nerdy

Examples of wonkish in a sentence

  • Being a renegade Islamo-punk had run its course, but now I answered brothers' questions in a wonkish intellectual way, ducking and weaving around the truth claims.2009, Michael Muhammad Knight, Journey to the End of Islam, Soft Skull Press, →ISBN, page 207:
  • Etzler was a follower of the wonkish French utopian Charles Fourier, who promised that the scientific reinvention of nature would transmute the saltwater into lemonade.2025 March 18, Samuel Moyn, “Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 27 Mar...

Synonyms of wonkish

Forms of wonkish

comparativemore wonkish
superlativemost wonkish

Origin of wonkish

From wonk + -ish.

Words formed from wonkish

Questions about wonkish

What does wonkish mean?
Wonkish means nerdy; bookish; having the qualities of a wonk.
How do you use wonkish in a sentence?
Being a renegade Islamo-punk had run its course, but now I answered brothers' questions in a wonkish intellectual way, ducking and weaving around the truth claims.
What part of speech is wonkish?
Wonkish is an adjective.

Words near wonkish in the dictionary

  1. wonkiest
  2. wonkily
  3. wonkiness
  4. wonking out
  5. Wonkipedia
  6. wonkish
  7. wonkishly
  8. wonkishness
  9. wonks
  10. wonks out
  11. wonky

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wonkish (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-wonkish.wav.

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