armchair

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See also: arm-chair

English

Armchair from the Pearson Scott Foresman collection

Alternative forms

Etymology

From arm +‎ chair

Pronunciation

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  • Audio (US):(file)

Noun

armchair (plural armchairs)

  1. A chair with supports for the arms or elbows.
    • 1918, W. B. Maxwell, chapter 12, in The Mirror and the Lamp‎[1]:
      There were many wooden chairs for the bulk of his visitors, and two wicker armchairs with red cloth cushions for superior people. From the packing-cases had emerged some Indian clubs, […], and all these articles […] made a scattered and untidy decoration that Mrs. Clough assiduously dusted and greatly cherished.
    • 1928, A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner:
      […] when he suddenly saw Piglet sitting in his best armchair he could only stand there rubbing his head and wondering whose house he was in.

Hypernyms

Meronyms

Coordinate terms

Translations

Adjective

armchair (not comparable)

  1. (figuratively) Remote from actual involvement, including a person retired from previously active involvement.
    These days I'm an armchair detective.
  2. (figuratively) Unqualified or uninformed but yet giving advice, especially on technical issues, such as law, architecture, medicine, military theory, or sports.
    He's just an armchair lawyer who thinks he knows a lot about the law because he reads a legal blog on the internet.
    After the American football game, the armchair quarterbacks talked about what they would have done differently to win, if they had been star athletes instead of out-of-shape old men.

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

armchair (third-person singular simple present armchairs, present participle armchairing, simple past and past participle armchaired)

  1. To create based on theory or general knowledge rather than data.
    • 1966, Sales Management - Volume 97, Issues 8-14, page 31:
      Research for program's subject matter is like mining gold. The more raw material we have, the more likely we are going to find gold nuggets. But this step is often overlooked and a program is "armchaired" from the office of the vice-president or vice-president of sales.
    • 1970, Carmen J. Finley, ‎Frances S. Berdie, The national assessment approach to exercise development, page 84:
      The very serious question is then raised as to whether reasonable and logical distractors can be "armchaired" or whether the practice of administering a question in open-end format to obtain logical distractors is a better procedure.
    • 1976, John Mordechai Gottman, A couple's guide to communication, page xxv:
      We think it makes sense to generate interventions empirically by finding out how couples deal with conflict, rather than by armchairing interventions.
  2. To theorize based on analysis of data that was gathered previously; To reflect.
    • 1968, Daniel C. Pfannstiel, ‎Barbara H. Matthews, Cooperative extension organization and administration:
      In past years, we administered this questionnaire and gave the results to the president who sat at a conference table with top management and armchaired some answers.
    • 1976, Dato N De Gruijter, ‎Leo J. Th. van der Kamp, Advances in Psychological and Educational Measurement, page 113:
      Briefly it may be stated: Operations come first; concepts follow; theory aims at developing concepts, from operations, plus a nomological network for those concepts, which explains the structure of the data obtained through those operations. And this does not exclude the theorist from doing some 'armchairing' in thinking about logically consistent models, their empirical pentialities, their assumptions and their implications; he may, and usually will, venture some possible empirical interpretations of a model, but in doing so he will carefully avoid any substantive (nonformal) pre-operational definition of a concept or construct.
    • 2012, Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts:
      Even before the Glasses had arrived in New Guinea, two American anthropologists at Tulane University, Ann and J. L. Fischer, had armchaired a connection between kuru and cannibalism by working their way through the findings of a team of anthropologists who had studied the Fore in the early 1950s, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, as well as the many papers on kuru that Gajdusek, Zigas and various Australian investigators had published.

References

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