mean girl

English

Alternative forms

• meangirl

Etymology

Popularized by the 2004 teen comedy film Mean Girls.

Noun

mean girl (plural mean girls)

1. (informal) A girl who tries to elevate her social status through bullying and cliquey behaviour, especially at a high school.
   • 2008, Laura Ross, The Valley Girl Turns 40, page 110:

     Before you know it, they're off to junior high. At this point, you start to kind of remember things from the times when you were there, especially the mean girl stuff.

   • 2018 December 7, Mary Ann Harlan, The Girl-Positive Library: Inspiring Confidence, Creativity, and Curiosity in Young Women, ABC-CLIO, →ISBN, page 48:

     When mean girls are protagonists, unlikability is used to provide complexity to their narration that reminds us of mean girl as person.

   • 2018 December 17, Patrice A. Oppliger, Tweencom Girls: Gender and Adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN, page 6:

     African American mean girls include Davida Williams as Claire in Lizzie McGuire, Taveeta Szymanowicz as Valerie in Make It Pop, LaTangela as Maritza in Taina, and Shanica Knowles as Amber in Hannah Montana.

   • 2021 March 18, John Fox Bershof, MD, The Second History of Man, skynetMD, →ISBN:

     This dipping into and out of the worlds of Viennese composers and American mean girls was a roundabout way of discussing how the physician Ádám Politzer had the good fortune to learn medicine in Vienna during the Second Viennese School, amid all that creativity and learning and good music.

Further reading

• Relational aggression on Wikipedia.Wikipedia