Waldo
noun
Pierre or Peter, died c1217, French merchant and religious reformer, declared a heretic: founder of the Waldenses.
Waldo
American
[wawl-doh, wol-]
/ ˈwɔl doʊ, ˈwɒl- /
noun
waldo
British
/ ˈwɔːldəʊ /
noun
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
The stadium was awash in fans wearing their Where’s Waldo red striped jerseys.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 13, 2026
Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”
From Slate ● Apr. 2, 2026
“Now, I completely know what it means. Waldo, this protagonist, her voice — I was waking up in the middle of the night thinking of this character.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 19, 2026
He suggested I look into Ralph Waldo Emerson, a supposedly famous old poet.
From "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" by Ransom Riggs
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
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
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
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
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.
