Putz
name, noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A fool, an idiot. derogatory, slang
"“The excitement of our friendship made me overlook my vampire powers.” “Hi.” “My foreskin grew back very fast. Now he thinks I'm meshuggener, which means he thinks I'm a little bit of a putz.”"
- 2 A decoration or ornament in the Nativity tradition, usually placed under a Christmas tree.
"The American custom of erecting a putz seems to have originated with the Moravians but the custom long ago spread to non-Moravian households. Essentially, the putz is a landscape, built on the floor or on a table or portable platform."
- 3 obscene terms for penis wordnet
- 4 A jerk. derogatory, slang
"And, (4), we’re not really even seeing “characters” at all: it’s not Major Frank Burns, pathetic self-important putz from Fort Wayne, Indiana; it’s Larry Linville of Ojai, California, actor stoic enough to endure thousands of letters (still coming in, even in syndication) from pseudo-voyeurs berating him for being a putz from Indiana."
- 5 (Yiddish) a fool; an idiot wordnet
Show 1 more definition
- 6 The penis. slang
- 1 To waste time. intransitive, slang
"Stop putzing around."
- 2 To go around viewing the putzes in the neighborhood. German, Pennsylvania, intransitive
"Once all good Moravians in Bethlehem went putzing between Christmas and Twelfth Night to take a look at their friends' cribs."
- 1 A surname from German.
Example
More examples"Did you come all the way out here just to putz around or what?"
Etymology
Borrowed from Yiddish פּאָץ (pots, “penis, fool”). Compare similar semantic developments in futz.
Borrowed from Pennsylvania German Putz; compare German Putz (“ornament, decoration, finery”), putzen (“to clean; decorate”). Compare the above.
Borrowed from German Putz or Pütz.
Related phrases
More for "putz"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.