nodding acquaintance
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.03 in modern English
35
Scrabble Score
19
Letters
4
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A casual or partial familiarity; a relationship which is not close or fully developed; an inexact understanding (of something).
noun
Someone who is a remote or passing acquaintance.
Example Sentences
- "None of the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a nodding acquaintance with them."
- "There isn't any doubt but that he had a nodding acquaintance with every pretty girl in town."
- "[A] Northwestern University psychologist reported, for what it was worth, a surprising finding: an average college-educated modern man has at least a nodding acquaintance with four times as many words as Shakespeare used."
- "A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11."
- "[T]o reach Cattewater I must either fetch a circuit through purlieus where every householder knew me and every urchin was a nodding acquaintance, or make a straight dash."
- "He could not treat this scandalous matter in his own office. . . . Who was there he could go to? Linkman and Laver in Budge Row, perhaps—reliable, not too conspicuous, only nodding acquaintances."