dada
dada Lexical Profile
dada Game Scores & Validity
• noun
An early 20th-century European avant-garde art and literary movement (usually capitalized as Dada) founded during World War I that rejected traditional aesthetic values in favor of nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest.
"The museum exhibition featured collages and readymade sculptures created by pioneers of Dada."
One's father (used primarily by or to very young children).
"The toddler pointed excitedly at the door and babbled when her dada came home from work."
• Rhymes for dada
Word Origin & Etymology
As an informal word for a father, it arose from infantile reduplication of syllables. As the name of the 20th-century art movement, it was adopted in Zurich in 1916 from French dada ('hobbyhorse'), reportedly selected at random from a dictionary to reflect the movement's embrace of chance and absurdity.