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English
Noun
twenty-five cent word (plural twenty-five cent words)
- (Canada, US, dated) Synonym of ten-dollar word.
1950, Jack Kerouac, chapter 11, in The Town and the City, New York: Harcourt, published 1983, page 331:The old man chuckled. “Well, you can bandy twenty-five cent words all you want, but— Say! we’ve never had a talk like this before, have we? […] ”
- 1988, Howard Rosenthal, Not With My Life I Don’t: Preventing Your Suicide and That of Others, Muncie, Indiana: Accelerated Development, Inc., Chapter 4, p. 18,
- Some of the most incredible cases I have ever worked with involve the act of pulling strands of hair from one’s own head. Psychiatrists and psychologists have a twenty-five cent word for this behavior. They call it Trichotillomania.
2015, Barbara Baig, Spellbinding Sentences, Blue Ash, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, Section 2, Chapter 4, p. 37:Remember that while the English language has lots of “twenty-five cent” words like perturb or effrontery, statuesque or decorous, it also has lots of essential short, sturdy words like of or but, say or stop or glow.