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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

dummy.

A silent person; a person who does not talk.

5 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈdʌmi/
  1. A silent person; a person who does not talk.

    dated
  2. A stupid person.

    Don't be such a dummy!
  3. A term of address.

    slang
    Hey dummy, what's good wit chu?
  4. A figure of a person or animal used by a ventriloquist; a puppet.

  5. Something constructed with the size and form of a human, to be used in place of a person.

    To understand the effects of the accident, we dropped a dummy from the rooftop.
  6. A person who is the mere tool of another; a man of straw.

  7. A deliberately nonfunctional device or tool used in place of a functional one.

    The hammer and drill in the display are dummies.
  8. A pacifier; a plastic or rubber teat used to soothe or comfort a baby.

    Australia · Ireland · New-Zealand · UK
    The baby wants her dummy.
  9. A player whose hand is shown and is to be played from by another player.

  10. A word serving only to make a construction grammatical.

    The pronoun "it" in "It's a mystery why this happened" is a dummy.
  11. An unused parameter or value.

    If flag1 is false, the other parameters are dummies.
  12. A feigned pass or kick or play in order to deceive an opponent.

  13. A bodily gesture meant to fool an opposing player; a feint.

    UK
  14. A newborn animal that is indifferent to stimulus and does not voluntarily move.

    attributive
    a dummy calf, lamb, or foal
  15. A fairy chess piece that cannot move or capture, but can be captured and used to skip moving another piece.

Where this word comes from

From dumb + -y. Pacifier sense from dummy teat where dummy is in the sense of a nonfunctional replica.

verb/ˈdʌmi/
  1. To make a mock-up or prototype version of something, without all of the intended functionality.

    The carpenters dummied some props for the rehearsals.
  2. To feint.

Where this word comes from

From dumb + -y. Pacifier sense from dummy teat where dummy is in the sense of a nonfunctional replica.

adv/ˈdʌmi/
  1. Extremely.

    US · slang
    It's dummy hot outside.
Where this word comes from

From dumb + -y. Pacifier sense from dummy teat where dummy is in the sense of a nonfunctional replica.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.