Cretin

//ˈkɹiːtɪn// noun

noun ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A person who fails to develop mentally and physically due to a congenital hypothyroidism. archaic
  2. 2
    a person of subnormal intelligence wordnet
  3. 3
    An idiot. broadly, derogatory

    "When I challenged the symbolism, tried to make the professor consider the book as a piece of realism, he regarded me as if I were an absolute cretin. He got very supercilious and condescending […]"

Example

More examples

"Cultural Anthropology studies the tradition and norms of people and the rules they made as how they interact with one another or behave in some cretin ways."

Etymology

From French crétin (“cretin, idiot”), likely from crestin, an Alpine dialectal form of chrétien, from Latin christiānus in the lost sense of “anyone in Christendom”, often with a sense of “poor fellow”. Doublet of Christian.

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