whopper
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈwɒp.ə(ɹ)/, /ˈʍɒp.ə(ɹ)/
Audio (Southern England): (file)
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˈwɑ.pɚ/, /ˈʍɑ.pɚ/
- Rhymes: -ɒpə(ɹ)
Noun
[edit]whopper (plural whoppers)
- (informal) Something remarkably large.
- 1889, Jerome K. Jerome, chapter 17, in Three Men in a Boat […] [1]:
- I’d gone out pike fishing, bless you, never thinking of a trout, and when I saw that whopper on the end of my line, blest if it didn’t quite take me aback. Well, you see, he weighed twenty-six pound.
- 1910, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “The Poet and the Peasant”, in Strictly Business[2]:
- I’ve just run down from Ulster County to look at the town, bein’ that the hayin’s over with. Gosh! but it’s a whopper. I thought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this here town is five times as big.
- 1939, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf, The Wizard of Oz:
- There's a storm blowing up, Sylvester—a 'whopper', speaking in the vernacular of the peasantry.
- (informal) An outrageous or blatant lie.
- 1894, Mark Twain, chapter XII, in Tom Sawyer Abroad:
- When he got done telling it there was one of them uncomfortable silences that comes, you know, when a person has been telling a whopper and you feel sorry for him and wish you could think of some way to change the subject and let him down easy, […]
- 1922 February, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], →OCLC:
- Coming out with a whopper now. Rhapsodies about damn all. Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a good memory.
- 1997 [1990], David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN:
- Isuzu Inc. hit pay dirt in the late '80s with its series of “Joe Isuzu” spots, featuring an oily, Satanic-looking salesman who told whoppers about Isuzu's genuine llama-skin upholstery and ability to run on tapwater.
Translations
[edit]something remarkably large
|
outrageous lie
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See also
[edit]Further reading
[edit]- “whopper n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present
Spanish
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]- IPA: [ˈhwo̞pe̞r], [ˈw̝o̞pe̞r]
Noun
[edit]whopper m (plural whoppers)
Further reading
[edit]- Seco, Manuel; Andrés, Olimpia; Ramos, Gabino (2023), “whopper”, in Diccionario del español actual (in Spanish), third digital edition, Fundación BBVA
Categories:
- English terms suffixed with -er
- English 2-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- Rhymes:English/ɒpə(ɹ)
- Rhymes:English/ɒpə(ɹ)/2 syllables
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English informal terms
- English terms with quotations
- Spanish lemmas
- Spanish nouns
- Spanish terms spelled with WH
- Spanish countable nouns
- Spanish terms spelled with W
- Spanish masculine nouns
- en:Size
- en:Lying