Numberwang
noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A situation involving a bewildering succession of numbers. UK, slang, uncountable
"Out of the window went the idea that perhaps children are humans with emotions and background and psyche and dream, and instead in rushed labelling and tracking and spreadsheets and monitoring and failure and rapid progress and interventions and scores and you-can-but-you-over-there-can't, and here's a test and here's another one and, oh, here's another one, and all the time in this great big educational Numberwang comes one thing, sneaking in inside the Trojan Horse of accountability: FEAR."
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of Numberwang. alt-of, uncountable
- 3 The manipulation of statistics. UK, slang, uncountable
"Digital Radio Working Group: It must be Numberwang !"
Example
More examples"Out of the window went the idea that perhaps children are humans with emotions and background and psyche and dream, and instead in rushed labelling and tracking and spreadsheets and monitoring and failure and rapid progress and interventions and scores and you-can-but-you-over-there-can't, and here's a test and here's another one and, oh, here's another one, and all the time in this great big educational Numberwang comes one thing, sneaking in inside the Trojan Horse of accountability: FEAR."
Etymology
number + wang, from a 2006 That Mitchell and Webb Look comedy sketch about a nonsensical game show in which contestants shout random numbers and the host replies "That's Numberwang!"
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.