twirp

British

/ twɜːp /

noun

a variant spelling of twerp

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Explanation

A twirp is a ridiculous, annoying person. You couldn't be blamed for calling your obnoxious younger brother a twirp. The more common spelling is twerp, but either way a twirp is silly and drives you crazy. It's not nice to call someone a twirp, so you should save it for emergencies: "You twirp! Why'd you put my phone in the dishwasher?" One theory of twirp's origin says it came from the name T.W. Earp, a controversial student union president at Oxford in 1911, while other experts believe the word didn't appear until the 1920s.

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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.

A little twirp in the background had a blurb which said: "Gee, look, a Marine!"

From Time Magazine Archive

“Once when I was a young twirp shippin’ on a freighter, a hurricane struck us off the Florida Keys.

From Whispering Walls by Wirt, Mildred A. (Mildred Augustine)

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023