panjandrum
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of panjandrum
1745–55; pseudo-Latin word (based on pan- ) coined by Samuel Foote (1720–77), English dramatist and actor
Explanation
You can refer to the bossy, self-important president of your school's French club as a panjandrum, especially when she marches around assigning everyone tasks. Something about the word panjandrum suggests subcontinental origin, but it's actually a made-up word from the eighteenth century, designating an important and often overbearing person. The word was also commandeered in World War II to refer to a failed experimental weapon meant to breach sea walls.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Roberts’ smoldering, high-beam intensity caught the attention of Joe Papp, a panjandrum of New York theater who cast Roberts in a Public Theater production of the Civil War drama “Rebel Women.”
From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 17, 2024
At the time they were written, such sentiments were heresy to the Left Bank literati and their grand panjandrum, Jean-Paul Sartre.
From Time Magazine Archive
Last week Harry Truman, by right of office, was the presiding panjandrum at the nation's annual rite of spring, the Washington Senators' opening ball game.
From Time Magazine Archive
Even the high panjandrum of Asian neutralism, India's Nehru, showed signs of distress�and the Indian public showed far more.
From Time Magazine Archive
He had somehow got hold of the regalia of the order and drawlingly announced himself as the great panjandrum who had come to take part.
From The Last Leaf Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe by Hosmer, James Kendall
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
