nimrod
nimrod Lexical Profile
nimrod Game Scores & Validity
• noun
North American A foolish, inept, or gullible person (informal).
"Some nimrod parked right across the end of our driveway and blocked everyone in."
A skillful or passionate hunter.
"In nineteenth-century sporting journals, seasoned outdoorsmen were often praised as bold nimrods of the wilderness."
Word Nuance & Usage
In contemporary North American usage, 'nimrod' is almost exclusively an informal insult meaning 'fool' or 'idiot', whereas its older literary sense of 'skilled hunter' is now largely archaic or ironic.
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
From the biblical figure Nimrod (Hebrew Nimrōd), a great-grandson of Noah described in the Book of Genesis as 'a mighty hunter before the Lord.' Its shift to mean an inept person or fool in 20th-century American slang was popularized by Looney Tunes cartoons, in which Bugs Bunny sarcastically called the bumbling hunter Elmer Fudd a 'poor little Nimrod.'