wooden nutmeg
wooden nutmeg noun: synonym of wooden nickel (“a worthless item intended to appear like another of value”).
Noun
wooden nutmeg (plural wooden nutmegs)
- Synonym of wooden nickel (“a worthless item intended to appear like another of value”).
- These were nearly all Yankees, regarded by the Southern people as a trafficking, tricky set, ready to sell a wooden nutmeg or any other sham. They, in turn, looked on the Kentuckians as a lazy, shiftless class, subsisting on hog, hominy and corn-bread, and willing tools in their hands.1879, William Henry Perrin, Albert Adams Graham, D. M. Blair, editors, The History of Coles County, Illinois, page 343
- But every child in the union knows that the most famous products of Connecticut are Yankee notions, nutmegs made of wood and clocks that won't go. Now, your Civil Service Reform is just such another Yankee notion; it's a wooden nutmeg; it's a clock with a show case and sham works. And you know it!1880, [Henry Brooks Adams], chapter III, in Democracy: An American Novel (Leisure-hour Series; no. 112), New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, →OCLC, pages 61–62
- Synonyms:
- wooden nickel
Examples of wooden nutmeg in a sentence
- Fall is one of those live Yankees who is always ready to whittle out a wooden nutmeg while waiting for his horse to gain wind when stuck in the mud.1898, William James McKnight, A Pioneer History of Jefferson County, Pennsylvania: And My First Recollections of Brookville, Pennsylvania...
- The assumption in the public mind was that anyone who bought a wooden nutmeg was a fool who should have known better than to fall for a trick.2001, Steven Carter, Leopards in the Temple: Selected Essays, 1990-2000, page 101:
Synonyms of wooden nutmeg
Forms of wooden nutmeg
| plural | wooden nutmegs |
|---|
Questions about wooden nutmeg
- What does wooden nutmeg mean?
- Wooden nutmeg means synonym of wooden nickel (“a worthless item intended to appear like another of value”).
- How do you use wooden nutmeg in a sentence?
- Fall is one of those live Yankees who is always ready to whittle out a wooden nutmeg while waiting for his horse to gain wind when stuck in the mud.
- What part of speech is wooden nutmeg?
- Wooden nutmeg is a noun.
- What is the plural of wooden nutmeg?
- The plural of wooden nutmeg is wooden nutmegs.
Words near wooden nutmeg in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wooden nutmeg (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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