frenemy
/ˈfɹɛ.nɪ.mi/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.01 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
3
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Painting with a bland stroke, hardly mixing color on palette or canvas, working neatly, quickly, deftly, and a bit hygienically—like an Old World gentleman—over his “spontaneous” projects—indeed, “tickling” his way along, to borrow frenemy Picasso's devastating verb—he [Henri Matisse] seems never to be deeply involved or even slightly carried away by his work."
- "Another enemy / Not even a frenemy."
- "Frenemies who when you're down ain't your friend"
- "In France the Seine has all the advantages of Northernness (a quality underrated by our Gallic frenemy) but it is too fatally interested in Paris […]"
- "You know when you dump a guy, only to discover years later that he's evolved into the perfect boyfriend—for the high-school frenemy who convinced you to dump him in the first place...?"
- "So why did we break up? Enter Blaize St. John, frenemy extraordinaire. She came, she saw, she stole my boyfriend."
Etymology
Blend of friend + enemy. Invented independently multiple times. Attested in 1952 without any scare quotes or self-referential apology, clearly suggesting that the writer expected his audience to be unsurprised by encountering the word, but used by other writers in 1979 and 1992 in ways that indicate that those writers considered it a nonce blend and expected that their audiences would view it that way too; these examples are evidence that the word existed for many decades during which it was not yet widely familiar or established (which it now is).