Wellerism

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A proverb, often a fatuous one, attributed to speaker in a situation.

    "Examples of Romance Wellerisms are rather infrequent in literature and must be gathered from oral tradition."

  2. 2
    Alternative letter-case form of Wellerism. alt-of

    "[…]without adding the names of those who were widely known to be responsible for the coinage of such wellerisms."

  3. 3
    a comparison comprising a well-known quotation followed by a facetious sequel wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
apologetic proverbapologetic proverb

Example

More examples

"Examples of Romance Wellerisms are rather infrequent in literature and must be gathered from oral tradition."

Etymology

From Weller + -ism, after the character Sam Weller in Charles Dickens' 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.