claque
Americannoun
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a group of persons hired to applaud an act or performer.
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a group of sycophants.
The agency head was applauded, as always, by a claque of appointees.
noun
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a group of people hired to applaud
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a group of fawning admirers
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of claque
First recorded in 1860–65; from French, derivative of claquer “to clap”
Vocabulary lists containing claque
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:
Beginning as a feud between culturally ambitious game critics and a claque of revanchist fans, Gamergate became a free-floating snowball of grievance.
From The Verge ● Dec. 12, 2019
There’s a claque alongside to cheer the big boss and deride his doubters.
From The New Yorker ● Jan. 13, 2017
He enrolled at the Kunstakademie, an avant-garde hotbed soon dominated by Joseph Beuys, the shamanistic godfather of conceptualism—although Richter was always highly skeptical of the hero-worshipping claque Beuys gathered around himself.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 14, 2016
Geller and her claque pretend that they are the beleaguered defenders of a dire threat to 1st Amendment guarantees of free speech.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 5, 2015
Then he proceeded to mimic the way I spoke, giving me what he perceived to be a Gcaleka accent, at which his own claque laughed heartily.
From "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela
In French theatre, groups of professional clappers, known as "claques", were hired by performers to make them appear more popular with audiences.
From BBC ● May 28, 2015
A message from Vice President Nixon was mysteriously held up in red tape for five days, but from the opening day, claques cheered greetings from Khrushchev, Chou En-lai and the "Prime Minister of North Korea."
From Time Magazine Archive
All the world's great opera houses have claques, and the Met's is typical.
From Time Magazine Archive
And Rusk might well have touchy going with such political headliners as Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles and G. Mennen Williams, all of them with vociferous political claques, and better known than Dean Rusk.
From Time Magazine Archive
The discrepancy was sometimes explicable by claques, which are almost as discreditable to managements as the keeping of tame critics, who eat food out of their hand.
From Without Prejudice by Zangwill, Israel
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.
