sidekick
Americannoun
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sidekicks
plural
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a close friend.
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a confederate or assistant.
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of sidekick
Explanation
A sidekick is a buddy who comes with you on your adventures. If you’re a superhero, your sidekick helps you fight crime. Electra Woman’s sidekick was the teenage Dyna Girl, and in the ‘70s they defeated villains on TV. A sidekick might be a work assistant, a best friend, or even a devoted dog that follows you to school every day. Sometimes this word signifies an imbalance of power, though; if you say, “This is my sidekick, Sarah," it implies that Sarah has less authority than you do. The origin of this word is unknown, but we do know that it appeared after the terms side-pal and side-partner fell out of fashion.
Vocabulary lists containing sidekick
Superhero Lexicon
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New Kid
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Comic Book Day
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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.
See Examples For:
Melanie Sykes became the new overarching voice of the show, taking over from Black's trusted sidekick, "Our Graham" Skidmore.
From BBC ● Aug. 26, 2026
Who, then, was the sidekick in that relationship?
From Slate ● Jul. 14, 2026
And so it will, for at least several more years, Austin Reaves now occupying a Laker leading sidekick role made famous during their championship years by the likes of Anthony Davis and Pau Gasol.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 24, 2026
And for a time he becomes the sidekick of an out-of-work guerrilla in the Central African Republic.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 8, 2026
I’d always thought of her as Sally’s sidekick, never as being her own person too.
From "The Lions of Little Rock" by Kristin Levine
Petrified, she recruited two charismatic friends as alternating sidekicks: daycare owner and activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and civil rights attorney Florynce Kennedy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 3, 2026
From meetings with foreign leaders to the control room of a SpaceX launch, Musk's children have debuted as constant sidekicks to their father's endeavors in tech, business and now, politics.
From BBC ● Feb. 14, 2025
They’re like Boris and Natasha, if Boris and Natasha had gay sidekicks whose equally unsurprising side plot would’ve made a more thorny and altogether insightful critique of contemporary social politics.
From Salon ● Jan. 31, 2025
As creators and consumers, educators and entertainers, whipping boys, final girls, sidekicks and suicides, queer people have, often invisibly, sometimes tragically, always forcefully shaped American culture, particularly through the prism of Hollywood.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 6, 2024
The house, the trees, and the sidekicks cast tall shadows that reminded Nicole of an art exhibit she’d seen by an African-American artist.
From "Beauty Queens" by Libba Bray
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.
