fuddy-duddy
Americannoun
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a person who is stuffy, old-fashioned, and conservative.
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a person who is fussy or picayune about details; fussbudget.
adjective
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stuffy, old-fashioned, and conservative.
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fussy; picayune.
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of fuddy-duddy
First recorded in 1900–05; of obscure origin
Explanation
An old-fashioned, fussy person can be called a fuddy-duddy. You might accuse your best friend of being a fuddy-duddy if she prefers staying home drinking tea and reading on Saturday nights, instead of going dancing with you. A fuddy-duddy has no sense of humor and is disapproving and a bit pompous. Fuddy-duddies seem dull and conservative, overly careful, and critical of other people's decisions. While we know fuddy-duddy first appeared in print in the late 1800s, and that it originated in the United States, its origin is a mystery.
Vocabulary lists containing fuddy-duddy
O'Reilly's Lexicon of Epithets
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A Wind in the Door
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Bob Newhart (1929–2024) Tribute List
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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.
See Examples For:
He’s a fuddy-duddy, and he only makes it worse his habit of making bad jokes and then reacting petulantly when people don’t laugh at them.
From Salon ● Jun. 15, 2026
Richard Martin says: "It was the 60s, the government wanted to be modern and thrusting, it wanted to get rid of old fuddy-duddy stuff."
From BBC ● Jan. 29, 2023
Few Britons now recoil at the prospect of King Charles III, even if he sometimes seems more a fuddy-duddy uncle than a national patriarch.
From New York Times ● Sep. 8, 2022
She designed the spirit to pique curiosity of younger drinkers who think of genever as too fuddy-duddy, she told me.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 18, 2021
You can lead your class all you want to with your silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk!
From The White Linen Nurse by Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell
We tend to think of people from long ago as credulous, unsophisticated fuddy-duddies.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 13, 2021
If those sessions were going on with a bunch of fuddy-duddies they wouldn’t be getting such good results.”
From The Guardian ● Jan. 10, 2016
For self-consciously “edgy” believers, there’s Bad Christian, in which a pastor and two musicians razz each other and blast the fuddy-duddies who don’t get it.
From Slate ● Dec. 14, 2014
Even more startling, some of the fuddy-duddies in traditional media turn out to have a bigger millennial audience than Vice — including, uh, The New York Times, Mr. McDermott said..
From New York Times ● Oct. 10, 2014
He talks William the Conqueror and all those old fuddy-duddies by the yard, but he can't make me see the use of them, and you can't.
From Three Margarets by Barry, Etheldred B. (Etheldred Breeze)
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.
