pac-man
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.92 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
3
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- ""Medicaid is becoming the Pac-Man of state government, eating up every dollar," remarked one official."
- "Chlorine acts like a Pac-Man of the high atmosphere, gobbling one ozone molecule after another and then being regenerated to gobble again."
- "The ironic deconstruction of all meaningful discourse, including normative discourse, says Gergen, "is like a Pac-Man of social pattern, gobbling all that stands in its path.""
- "Like the Pac-Man of garbage, Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI) is gobbling up smaller waste disposal firms — 113 in 1994 alone — as that industry becomes increasingly consolidated."
Etymology
From the popular arcade game Pac-Man (1980) and its player character, a circle with a snapping mouth gobbling dots in a maze. The original Japanese title of Puck Man (パックマン) was derived from パクパク (pakupaku, “gobble gobble”) (onomatopoeic) and マン (man), from English man; the title was changed for the North American release to mitigate vandalism (Puck → fuck).