taradiddle

noun

tar·a·did·dle ˌter-ə-ˈdi-dᵊl

ˌta-rə-ˈdi-dᵊl,

ˈter-ə-ˌdi-dᵊl,

ˈta-rə-ˌdi-dᵊl

variants or tarradiddle

Synonyms of taradiddle next

: fib

: pretentious nonsense

Did you know?

The true origin of taradiddle is unknown, but that doesn't mean you won't encounter a lot of balderdash about its history. Some folks try to connect it to the verb diddle (one meaning of which is "to swindle or cheat"), but that connection hasn't been proven and may turn out to be poppycock. You may even hear some tommyrot about this particular sense of diddle coming from the Old English verb didrian, which meant "to deceive," but that couldn't be true unless didrian was somehow suddenly revived after eight or nine centuries of disuse. No one even knows when taradiddle was first used. It must have been before it showed up in a 1796 dictionary of colloquial speech (where it was defined as a synonym of fib), but if we claimed we knew who said it first, and when, we'd be dishing out pure applesauce.

Examples of taradiddle in a Sentence

his tales of adventure are peppered with tongue-in-cheek taradiddles and obvious fabrications regards literary deconstruction as so much tenure-track taradiddle

Recent Examples on the Web

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Some are esoteric but still used—like taradiddle, which the list notes was recently used by J.K. Rowling but saw more play in the work of Gilbert and Sullivan, Honoré de Balzac and G.K. Chesterton. —