He asked about the expression after dinner that evening and to his chagrin “all the gentlemen present began laughing”. But when we reached my brother’s house, and the young gentleman had wished us good morning, my niece, to my great surprise, not only informed me that I was the kindest of uncles, but added that she could not express how much she felt obliged to me for doing gooseberry. I observed nothing particular on the road, except that my niece and our casual companion seemed very much taken up with one another, and left me to my own meditations. He told how he was accompanying his nineteen-year-old niece on a walk when a young man joined them. But when it first appeared, in the nineteenth century, matters were very different.Ī delightful story by a man who wrote under the pseudonym of “an old bachelor” appeared in Notes and Queries in 1860. As you might also say, “two’s company, three’s a crowd”. As you have learned, today it means intruding on a couple, usually lovers, who wish to be alone. Not the least odd thing about it is that in its fairly short history it has flipped sense. This odd phrase puzzles everybody who has come across it. A bit of Web searching confirmed the interpretation, but I remain baffled about the connection between fruit and intrusiveness.Ī You’re not alone. It was clear from the context that she meant an interloper who gets in the way of activities better suited for smaller groups being a fifth wheel is the familiar term I’d use. Just now I saw a 1998 episode of As Time Goes By in which one character, invited for a weekend in the country with four other characters, expresses concern about playing gooseberry. To learn more, see the privacy policy.Q From Marc S Glasser: Like many Americans, I learn a lot about the common language that divides us from British programs - er, programmes - that cross the pond and appear on American public television. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: Elastic Search, WordNet, and note that Reverse Dictionary uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. The definitions are sourced from the famous and open-source WordNet database, so a huge thanks to the many contributors for creating such an awesome free resource. In case you didn't notice, you can click on words in the search results and you'll be presented with the definition of that word (if available). For those interested, I also developed Describing Words which helps you find adjectives and interesting descriptors for things (e.g. So this project, Reverse Dictionary, is meant to go hand-in-hand with Related Words to act as a word-finding and brainstorming toolset. That project is closer to a thesaurus in the sense that it returns synonyms for a word (or short phrase) query, but it also returns many broadly related words that aren't included in thesauri. I made this tool after working on Related Words which is a very similar tool, except it uses a bunch of algorithms and multiple databases to find similar words to a search query. So in a sense, this tool is a "search engine for words", or a sentence to word converter. It acts a lot like a thesaurus except that it allows you to search with a definition, rather than a single word. The engine has indexed several million definitions so far, and at this stage it's starting to give consistently good results (though it may return weird results sometimes). For example, if you type something like "longing for a time in the past", then the engine will return "nostalgia". It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query. The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple.
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