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  • Waldo
    Waldo
    noun
    Pierre or Peter, died c1217, French merchant and religious reformer, declared a heretic: founder of the Waldenses.
  • waldo
    waldo
    noun
    a gadget for manipulating objects by remote control
Synonyms

Waldo

American  
[wawl-doh, wol-] / ˈwɔl doʊ, ˈwɒl- /

noun

  1. Pierre or Peter, died c1217, French merchant and religious reformer, declared a heretic: founder of the Waldenses.


waldo British  
/ ˈwɔːldəʊ /

noun

  1. a gadget for manipulating objects by remote control

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Etymology

Origin of waldo

C20: named after Waldo F. Jones, inventor in a science-fiction story by Robert Heinlein


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:

When most people think of the foundational figures in American environmentalism, they likely conjure up such wistful white Transcendentalists as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.

From Salon ● Jun. 19, 2026

Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

From Slate ● Apr. 2, 2026

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s standards of literary criticism, like his philosophy, are focused on realism, felt experience and humanity.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 24, 2026

Noonan also won Sundance’s Waldo Salt screenwriting award for the script.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 18, 2026

In their afternoons in the hospital, Pollard wooed her with quotes from Old Waldo while she tended to his leg.

From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand

The arms and hands were of the waldo type used to handle radioactive materials in a hot lab—four jointed fingers and an opposed thumb, metal duplicates of the human hand.

From Unwise Child by Randall Garrett

Snookums’ waldo fingers wrinkled the pages that way.

From Unwise Child by Randall Garrett

And the evidence shows that a pair of waldo hands smashed those switches.

From Unwise Child by Randall Garrett

Commute by rocket—or better yet stay home and do all your business by TV-telephone, or by waldo if it were that sort of thing.

From The Creature from Cleveland Depths by Fritz Leiber

See also bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud.

From The Jargon File, Version 4.2.2, 20 Aug 2000 by Guy L. Steele

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