Nudnik

//ˈnʊdnɪk// noun, slang

noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A person who is very annoying; a pest, a nag, a jerk. US, attributive, colloquial, sometimes

    "He interrupts people, and he is not interested in anything except what concerns him and his brother. He is a nudnick!"

  2. 2
    (Yiddish) someone who is a boring pest wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
viragobrimbullycrowfaggotharpy

Example

More examples

"A nudnik who believes he's profound is even worse than just a plain nudnik."

Etymology

From Yiddish נודניק (nudnik) < root of נודיען (nudyen, “to bore”) + ־ניק (-nik, “noun-forming suffix”) (English -nik). Ultimately from Proto-Slavic *nuda < Proto-Indo-European *newti- (“need”) < *new- (“death, to be exhausted”). Compare Russian ну́дный (núdnyj, “tedious”), Ukrainian нудни́й (nudnýj, “tedious”), Polish nudny (“boring”), Slovak nudný (“boring”), Old Church Slavonic ноудити (nuditi) or нѫдити (nǫditi, “to compel”), Hebrew נוּדְנִיק (“nag”).

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