snowclone
/ˈsnoʊ.kloʊn/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "I stumbled upon the site the other day, when I was looking up the origins of the "Im not an X, but I play one on TV" snowclone."
- "Suddenly snowclone hunters were documenting media usages suggesting that, in space, no one can hear you belch, bitch, blog, speak, squeak or suck."
- "Regular readers learned there first about snowclones, the basic building blocks of cliches, like "X is the new Y" or "you don't need a degree in A to do B.""
- "If so, you're being snowed under by snowclones — a category of fill-in-the-blank cliché identified by linguists."
- "When you read phrases like these in a newspaper, you've stumbled across a particular type of cliché: the snowclone."
- "The snowclone is mainstream enough now to appear in the title of a recently published book: This Is Your Brain on Joy."
Etymology
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈsnoʊ.kloʊn/
- British English: /ˈsnəʊ.kləʊn/