First recorded in 1940–45
First recorded in 1940–45
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Less than four months earlier, the carpet-cleaning company run by 21-year-old whiz kid Barry Minkow had a stock-market value of roughly $300 million.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026
I’m not a financial whiz kid, but investors trying to bring the price down so they can buy as much as possible, trying to scare the weaker hands.
From MarketWatch ● Nov. 19, 2025
In one scene, its whiz kid CEO grins from a billboard as “Prodigy is the future! Prodigy is forever!” repeats on a loop.
From Salon ● Aug. 31, 2025
He charmed Rao, a Harvard-educated whiz kid he’d met while at Goldman, to become his co-founder.
From Slate ● Dec. 12, 2024
That was the first prize—and it was won by some young chap who’s apparently a bit of a whiz kid when it comes to computers.
From "Stormbreaker" by Anthony Horowitz
"So kids who are struggling with things, it can show that you do not have to be a classroom whiz-kid, you can go through any route of life."
From BBC ● Aug. 22, 2021
But for the teen whiz-kid, something was missing.
From Salon ● Jul. 23, 2019
The memory that persists though, is the owlish whiz-kid lawyer, with horn-rimmed glasses and his pretty blond wife perched stoically behind him, laying out Nixon’s treachery in a dull monotone before the Senate Watergate Committee.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 1, 2017
He was also the first-ever composer in residence at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, where he and a crew of whiz-kid collaborators, collectively known as the Encounters Ensemble, staged multimedia events.
From New York Times ● May 27, 2015
If he knew he was arriving with a whiz-kid reputation, it didn’t show.
From "Becoming" by Michelle Obama
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.
