Weirdo

How to spell weirdo

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce weirdo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does weirdo mean?

1. nounA person regarded as strange, eccentric, or unsettling.

Weirdo in a sentence

• The new neighbour kept muttering to himself and the children called him a weirdo.

• She felt like a total weirdo for enjoying spreadsheets so much.

Where does weirdo come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The heart of this word is the old adjective 'weird', which traces back to the Old English noun 'wyrd', meaning fate or destiny, the unfolding course of events laid out for a person. In early use 'weird' worked as a noun for that destiny, and the famous Weird Sisters in Shakespeare's Macbeth were literally the goddesses of fate before later readers reinterpreted them as merely strange and eerie. From that supernatural sense the adjective drifted toward its modern meaning of 'odd' or 'uncanny' by the nineteenth century. The casual noun 'weirdo', a person regarded as strange, is a twentieth-century American coinage that simply adds the breezy slang ending '-o', the same playful suffix found in 'cheapo' and 'wino'. The spelling trap is the original Old English root itself: 'wyrd' became 'weird' with the vowels in the order e-i, which stubbornly defies the usual 'i before e' rule.

How the word is built

• weird (from Old English wyrd: fate, destiny)
• -o (informal noun-forming suffix)