Oddball
adj, noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 An eccentric or unusual person.
"Miss Quinn thought that Oswald spoke Russian well in view of his lack of formal training; she found the evening uninteresting. Donovan, with whom she had a date later, testified that she told him that Oswald was “kind of an oddball.”"
- 2 a person with an unusual or odd personality wordnet
- 3 A deviant stimulus that appears among repetitive stimuli during an experiment, to trigger an event-related potential in the participant.
- 1 Exotic, not mainstream. not-comparable
"An oddball word processor, for example, might never be supported by such helpful tools as spelling checkers, indexing programs, footnote utilities,..."
Example
More examples"It's simply that I don't really understand what an "oddball" is when said by a Mixi user."
Etymology
Compound of odd + ball. First used in late 1930s, describing an extra ball played as a bonus in pin-ball type games. Well-attested since the 1940s, with the adjective appearing earlier than the noun.
Related phrases
More for "oddball"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.