Oddball
/ˈɑːdˌbɔl/ adj, noun
adj, noun ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
Noun
- 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.
Adjective
- 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.