oddball
English · Thesaurus
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oddball
- /ˈɑːdˌbɔl/ US
Rhymes with -ɑːdbɔl
Where it comes from
Compound of odd + ball. First used in late 1930s, describing an extra ball played as a bonus in pin-ball type games. Well-attested since the 1940s, with the adjective appearing earlier than the noun.
noun oddballs
-
An eccentric or unusual person.
Miss Quinn thought that Oswald spoke Russian well in view of his lack of formal training; she found the evening uninteresting. Donovan, with whom she had a date later, testified that she told him that Oswald was “kind of an oddball.”
Similar: kook
- A deviant stimulus that appears among repetitive stimuli during an experiment, to trigger an event-related potential in the participant.
Similar: odd duck, strange fish, queer fish, weirdo
adjective
- Exotic, not mainstream. An oddball word processor, for example, might never be supported by such helpful tools as spelling checkers, indexing programs, footnote utilities,...
Thesaurus
noun
Similar: odd duck, strange fish, queer fish, weirdo
Translations
Every language
noun eccentric person
| Español | estrafalario |
|---|---|
| 日本語 | 変人 henjin |
| 中文 | 怪人 guàirén |
| Português | excêntrico |
| Français | excentrique, olibrius |
| Deutsch | Sonderling, Exzentriker |
| Italiano | sagoma, tomo |
| Română | ciudat |
| Русский | сумасбро́д sumasbród, чуда́к čudák, эксце́нтрик ekscéntrik |
adj exotic, not mainstream
| Español | estrafalario |
|---|
Talk about this word "oddball." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/oddball. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026. oddball. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/oddball "oddball." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/oddball.Cite this
@misc{oddball_2026,
title = {oddball},
howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
year = {2026},
url = {https://micwyn.com/word/oddball},
urldate = {2026-11-06}
}
