flummery
Americannoun
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flummeries
plural
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oatmeal or flour boiled with water until thick.
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fruit custard or blancmange usually thickened with cornstarch.
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any of various dishes made of flour, milk, eggs, sugar, etc.
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complete nonsense; foolish humbug.
noun
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informal meaningless flattery; nonsense
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a cold pudding of oatmeal, etc
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of flummery
1615–25; < Welsh llymru, with ending assimilated to -ery
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:
In his biography, Andrew Morton wrote that Diana was “deeply disenchanted with the protocol, the flummery and the artifice” of the family, and “the brittle formality” of royal life.
From New York Times ● Nov. 16, 2020
Anything we could do to stop this flummery from clogging our airwaves, inboxes and video streams would probably be worse than the problem itself.
From Fox News ● Jun. 12, 2020
"The production dispenses with conventional spectacle, colourful costumes and visual flummery," says The Guardian's Michael Billington.
From BBC ● Dec. 9, 2019
His career in flummery and flimflam was launched when he left reform school at age 14 to work as a Coney Island pitchman, then joined Dr. W.H.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 8, 2018
It sounded like a lot of flummery to Drave, but what did he know?
From "Strange the Dreamer" by Laini Taylor
It would have been filled with fruit, flummeries or blancmanges, biscuits, gateaux, jellies and ice cream.
From BBC ● May 10, 2013
Dishes included white soup, partridge pie and jelly desserts or flummeries.
From BBC ● May 10, 2013
The flattery, handholding and creative fudgery that are at the heart of diplomacy are the very sort of fancy-pants flummeries that the President abhors.
From Time Magazine Archive
There were plenty of ways to do this; all sorts of accounting flummeries had already been perpetrated, but a final tweak was needed.
From Time Magazine Archive
Johnnie had as yet seen nothing more pretentious than the starched and ruffled flummeries of a small mountain watering-place.
From The Power and the Glory by Arthur Ignatius Keller
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.
