wink-wink
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.20 in modern English
22
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To turn a blind eye to something; to make an indirect reference to something unspoken, especially something indecent.
Colloquial; Intransitive verb
Example Sentences
- "But instead of wink-winking at the law, I think the brave and righteous thing to do is to celebrate marijuana's true and most profound medicinal quality: It makes people feel good."
- "Though JFK was praised as a family man—married to the most glamorous first lady of the twentieth century—the press corps and the public wink-winked throughout his presidency."
- "In its totality, the serial 'roid revelations over the past week have created suspicions that a system of wink-winks and pinkie swears among stars, management and agents has existed through the last minute of baseball's unpoliced steroid era."
- "They would normally call you and say, ‘I need A, B and C.’ Now, it’s ‘I need A, B and C, and I need you to keep it on the up and up,’ ” he said. “They’ll say, ‘I want this all done legally, and I want no wink-winks.’"
- "He rejected the idea that pulling down Civil War monuments was, in effect, erasing the past, “They’re an attempt to rewrite history and to essentially celebrate a false narrative about what happened during the Civil War and to send the wink-winks, the dog whistles, as we’re fond of saying today, across the generations of what the Civil War was about,” Burns explained."