meddlesome
Americanadjective
adjective
Synonym Usage
See curious.
Other Word Forms
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
Artificial intelligence can paint meddlesome monkeys, speak in the basso profundo of James Earl Jones and play a tune to suit a hall of mirrors.
From New York Times ● Oct. 31, 2023
“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
The overall impression is of a world alive in a subversive and meddlesome manner, correlating with Conor’s anguished sense of powerlessness.
From Washington Post ● May 30, 2022
The help tended to be officious, the rules, if heeded, restrictive, and the management meddlesome.
From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
