meddlesome
Americanadjective
adjective
Related Words
See curious.
Other Word Forms
- meddlesomely adverb
- meddlesomeness noun
- unmeddlesome adjective
Etymology
Origin of meddlesome
Explanation
A meddlesome person gets in your business in a way that's totally annoying. In other words, they meddle. Respect people's privacy by not being meddlesome. In Yiddish, the word "yenta" is used for people who interfere in other people's business. A defining quality of the "yenta" is that they're meddlesome. You could say that someone who's meddlesome gets "in the middle" of your business, if that's the way you like to remember words. Just remember that the spelling is different from "middle." I don't mean to be meddlesome, but you'd be well advised not to confuse the words "meddle" and "middle," even if one helps you remember the other.
Vocabulary lists containing meddlesome
The Secret Garden
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The Blood of Olympus
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Blood Water Paint
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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.
And as the tribunes who stir up the populace’s antipathy toward Coriolanus, William DeMeritt and Zuzanna Szadkowski are bland, seemingly unwilling to decide whether their characters are nefarious or just mildly meddlesome.
From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 14, 2026
“I didn’t want Liz to be a meddlesome neighbor in someone’s life,” Miller says on a video call from her home office.
From Los Angeles Times • Jun. 5, 2023
Olga’s mother, Blanca, has never returned to see her children in almost 30 years, but she manages to keep close tabs from afar, sending periodic letters full of tedious ideological instruction and meddlesome guilt trips.
From New York Times • Jan. 10, 2022
Mostly, Ms. Dukakis specialized in wise, meddlesome or cynical mothers.
From Washington Post • May 1, 2021
Mr. Curtain had transformed all those meddlesome people into his own private workforce, and they didn’t even realize it.
From "The Mysterious Benedict Society" by Trenton Lee Stewart
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.
