wiseacre
noun
Did you know?
Wiseacre Has Old English Roots
Given the spelling and definition of wiseacre, you might guess that the word derives from the sense of wise meaning "insolent" or "fresh"—the sense that also gives us wise guy, wisecrack, and wisenheimer. But, in fact, wiseacre came to English by a different route: it is derived from the Middle Dutch wijssegger, meaning "soothsayer." Wiseacre first appeared in English way back in the 16th century, while the "insolent" sense of wise and the words formed from it are products of the 19th century. The etymologies of wiseacre and wise are not completely distinct, however; the ancestors of wiseacre are loosely tied to the same Old English root that gave us wise.
Synonyms
Examples of wiseacre in a Sentence
Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 6 June 2023
At the height of his career, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, film director Mike Nichols was widely regarded as something akin to the nation’s satirist in chief — our principal wit, wag, and wiseacre.
—Peter Tonguette, National Review, 4 Mar. 2021
The rest is an affirming mixture of pathos and zingers, memories and regrets, all told in the wiseacre voice of Duffy Sinclair.
—Joyce Sáenz Harris, Dallas News, 6 Apr. 2020
The wiseacres at Ivy and Coney are once again turning their neighborhood tavern into a month-long celebration of Hanukkah.
—Washington Post, 2 Dec. 2019
Bugs Bunny likes carrots and is a wiseacre, but Mickey is a cypher.
—Oliver Staley, Quartz, 5 Mar. 2020
The young cast of the first IT was, unsurprisingly, in large part made up of unknowns, with Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard, who played the wiseacre Richie, the best known of the bunch.
—Clark Collis, EW.com, 10 July 2019
Similarly, the Pink Ladies, a popular clique headed by Rizzo (Stockard Channing), deliver their wiseacre lines with a fair dose of irony.
—Vogue, 1 Feb. 2019
Once, as a wiseacre adolescent, he was almost cast opposite Burt Reynolds in an early '90s buddy-cop comedy, and really wishes that had panned out.
—August Brown, latimes.com, 11 July 2018
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'wiseacre.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Wiseacre.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wiseacre. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.
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wiseacre
noun
a modified form of early Dutch wijssegger "one who is thought to be able to foretell events"
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