Crossword clues for ignoramus
ignoramus
- Lunatic or amusing fool?
- Bojo, as his critics might say, is terribly smug on air
- Illiterate design or a museum's centrepiece
- I skirt around doubtful utterance brought up by fool
- Dummy run in a mo, using bombing
- Dropping back, dismiss a total flipping idiot
- Complete idiot
- Hardly Mensa material
- Not your Mensa candidate
- A know-nothing
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Ignoramus \Ig`no*ra"mus\, n. [L., we are ignorant. See Ignore.]
(Law) We are ignorant; we ignore; -- being the word formerly written on a bill of indictment by a grand jury when there was not sufficient evidence to warrant them in finding it a true bill. The phrase now used is, ``No bill,'' ``No true bill,'' or ``Not found,'' though in some jurisdictions ``Ignored'' is still used.
--Wharton (Law Dict. ). Burn.-
(pl. Ignoramuses.) A stupid, ignorant person; a vain pretender to knowledge; a dunce.
An ignoramus in place and power.
--South.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1570s, from an Anglo-French legal term (early 15c.), from Latin ignoramus "we do not know," first person present indicative of ignorare "not to know" (see ignorant). The legal term was one a grand jury could write on a bill when it considered the prosecution's evidence insufficient. Sense of "ignorant person" came from the title role of George Ruggle's 1615 play satirizing the ignorance of common lawyers.
Wiktionary
Etymology 1 n. A totally ignorant person—unknowledgeable, uneducated, or uninformed; a fool. Etymology 2
n. (context legal dated English) A grand jury ruling on an indictment when the evidence is determined to be insufficient to send the case to trial.
WordNet
n. an ignorant person [syn: know nothing, uneducated person]
Wikipedia
Ignoramus is a college farce, a 1615 academic play by George Ruggle. Written in Latin (with passages in English and French), it was arguably the most famous and influential academic play of English Renaissance drama. Ruggle based his play on La Trappolaria ( 1596), an Italian comedy by Giambattista della Porta (which in turn borrows from the Pseudolus of Plautus).
In Latin ignōrāmus the first-person plural present active indicative of īgnōrō (“I do not know”, “I am unacquainted with”, “I am ignorant of”) literally means “we are ignorant of” or “we do not know”. The term acquired its English meaning of an ignorant person or dunce as a consequence of Ruggle's play.
Usage examples of "ignoramus".
Either the eucalyptuses had perished and had been replaced ages ago, or the street had been named by an arboricultural ignoramus.
I am the greatest owl, monkey, baboon, rascal, oaf, ignoramus, blockhead, buffoon, or what you will.
Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.
I saw that Master Gaetan Costa was an ignoramus, but in spite of that I took him to my room and told Le Duc to address him in Spanish.
He knew that a despised ignoramus becomes an enemy, and Haller wished to be loved.
The husband was an ignoramus, Rob had long since decided, and Regine needed rescuing.
He who thought himself sublimely indifferent to the laughter of ignoramuses, now fencing against it!
Goblin seemed accidental and unmysterious, an ignoramus of a spirit who could deliver me nothing of consolation or companionship.
Although of pretended French origin, they are evidently the invention of an ignoramus, who knows nothing of the delicate anatomy of the generative organs or of the proper treatment of the diseases incident thereto, for none other would have thought of such a preposterous plan of treatment.
Pushkin, one of the best educated Europeans of his day, was called an ignoramus by Count Thingamabob and a dunce by General Donner-wetter.
Either the eucalyptuses had perished and had been replaced ages ago, or the street had been named by an arboricultural ignoramus.
This, according to the author, was the part of our Divine Redeemer, which above all others should be adored a curious idea of a besotted ignoramus, with which I got disgusted at the first page, for to my thinking the heart is no more worthy a part than the lungs, stomach.
The good bishop gently chid me for having called the friar-confessor of the Duke of Medina an ignoramus.
Treasured fragments of a dead civilization there were indeed—but how much of it has been reduced to gibberish, embellished with olive leaves and cherubims, by forty generations of us monastic ignoramuses, children of dark centuries, many, entrusted by adults with an incomprehensible message, to be memorized and delivered to other adults.
Treasured fragments of a dead civilization there were indeed--but how much of it has been reduced to gibberish, embellished with olive leaves and cherubims, by forty generations of us monastic ignoramuses, children of dark centuries, many, entrusted by adults with an incomprehensible message, to be memorized and delivered to other adults.