The word is sometimes used alone in a semi-exclamatory way, especially when someone has just said something foolish. It is also frequent as ‘you idiot’ and in expanded forms. Thus, an uncle addresses his nephew in Mariana, by Monica...

‘You great oaf’ is now typically a playful insult used by a woman to a man, referring to his clumsiness and hinting at his stupidity. That phrase is used in such a way in Edna Ferber’s Showboat, for instance. In Henry’s War, by...

In dialectology, a regionally restricted word typical of a certain dialect. Idiotisms were used in dialectology as markers whose occurrence marked the geographic spread of a particular dialectal area, cf. hulp ‘helped’ as a marker for...

Dictionary that contains specifically the vocabulary and idiomatic expressions (idiotisms) of a particular dialect or speech area. (In contrast, dialect...

Idiot is a word derived from the Greek ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs ("person lacking professional skill," "a private citizen," "individual"), from ἴδιος, idios ("private," "one's own").[1] In Latin the word idiota ("ordinary person, layman")...