tweedledum and tweedledee
/ˌtwiːdəlˈdʌm ən ˌtwiːdəlˈdiː/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.39 in modern English
36
Scrabble Score
23
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "The radicals said that Nixon and Humphrey were Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
- "Some officers were starting to call Edendale's two detective chief inspectors Tweedledum and Tweedledee, because they were rarely seen except when they were sitting alongside each other at the head of a briefing."
- "With their apparently identikit backgrounds and bland politicians' patter, the contest has sometimes seemed an incestuous choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. When even the promised fratricidal war between the Miliband brothers failed to take off, one newspaper cartoonist illustrated a caricature of the contestants with the caption: Who cares who wins?"
Etymology
From Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a pair of identical characters in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Their names may have originally come from an epigram written by poet John Byrom.