gremlin.
A contemptible person.
Meaning & usage
A contemptible person.
An imaginary creature reputed to be mischievously inclined, for example, to damage or dismantle machinery.
Any mysterious, unknown source of mischief or trouble, or the problem created thereby.
We rechecked everything, and we suspect gremlins in the database.
A young, inexperienced surfer or skateboarder, regarded as a nuisance.
A person regarded as similar to a fictional gremlin, in particular: mischievous, troublesome, short, or annoying.
Where this word comes from
Uncertain; the following etymologies have been suggested: * A variant of goblin. * From Irish gruaimín (“gloomy little person”); or from Dutch gremmelen (“to soil, stain; to spoil”), or griemelen, grimmelen (“(obsolete) to abound, teem; to swarm”); but Oxford English Dictionary says there is little evidence for such derivations. The word was popularized, especially in the United States, by the children’s novel The Gremlins (1943) by British author Roald Dahl (1916–1990), in which gremlins sabotage Royal Air Force aircraft in revenge for the destruction of their forest home to make way for an aircraft factory; the creatures later join forces with the British to fight the Nazis.
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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.