Word of the Day:
lemming
What It Means
A small arctic and subarctic rodent of the tribes Lemmini, Dicrostonychini and Lagurini.
Any member of a group given to conformity or groupthink, especially a group poised to follow a leader off a cliff.
Lemming in Context
“Like a lemming, I followed the crowd, got to the right line and was concentrating hard when queried by the customs officer.”
Did You Know?
From Danish and Norwegian lemming, from Old Norse lómundr, læmingi, læmingr (“lemming”), perhaps from Sami luomek. Sense 2 derives from a longstanding myth that they exhibit so much herd mentality that populations jump off cliffs to their deaths together.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: lemming (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “lemming.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lemming. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
