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Dork vs Dummy - What's the difference?

dork | dummy |

As a proper noun dork

is ellis island records indicate people registering as early as 1907 with dork as their last name [http://ellisislandorg/search/matchmoreasp?lnm=dork&plnm=dork&first_kind=1&kind=exact&offset=0&dwpdone=1].

As a noun dummy is

a silent person; a person who does not talk.

As a verb dummy is

to make a mock-up or prototype version of something, without some or all off its intended functionality.

dork

English

Etymology 1

US 1960s, sense of "silly person" presumably from earlier use as bowdlerization of Lawrence Poston, “ Some Problems in the Study of Campus Slang,” American Speech 39, no. 2 (May 1964) (JSTOR 453113): p. 118.Historical Dictionary of American Slang, v. 1, A-G, edited by Jonathan Lighter (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 638.

Noun

(en noun)
  • * 1962 , Jerome Weidman, The Sound of Bow Bells page 362:
    • As a matter of fact, this slob was full of information today. He told me why we Jews have different dorks .
  • * 2005 , Mike Judge, Reading Sucks: The Collected Works of Beavis and Butthead :
    • "There's that dork whose wife cut off his dork ." And when people ask him for an autograph he writes, "Best of luck to Betsy. Signed, the guy whose wife cut off his penis."
  • * 1962 , Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last year at Marienbad page 167:
    • I entitled the piece "Dorky", dork being slang for a person who does not belong to popular groups, usually an outsider, an odd person, sometimes inept, other times cranky.
  • * 1967 , Don Moser and Jerry Cohen, The Pied Piper of Tucson:
    • I didn’t have any clothes and I had short hair and looked like a dork . Girls wouldn’t go out with me.
    Usage notes
    Narrowly used to indicate someone inept or out of touch, broadly used to mean simply “silly, foolish”; compare (doofus), (twit).
    Derived terms
    * dorkface * to dorkify * dorkwad * dorky
    Synonyms
    * See also * See also

    Etymology 2

    Uncertain; apparently from (etyl). See (dirk).

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • (label)

    • References

    dummy

    English

    Noun

    (dummies)
  • A silent person; a person who does not talk.
  • An unintelligent person.
    • Don't be such a dummy !
  • A figure of a person or animal used by a ventriloquist; a puppet.
  • Something constructed with the size and form of a human, to be used in place of a person.
    • To understand the effects of the accident, we dropped a dummy from the rooftop.
  • A deliberately nonfunctional device or tool used in place of a functional one.
    • The hammer and drill in the display are dummies .
  • (AU, UK, NZ) A "dummy teat"; a plastic or rubber teat used to soothe or comfort a baby; a pacifier.
    • The baby wants her dummy .
  • * 2006 , Tizzie Hall, Save Our Sleep: A Parents? Guide Towards Happy, Sleeping Babies from Birth to Two Years , MacMillan 2009, page 200,
    • Then on the fifth day, at the first sleep of the day, remove the dummy' and follow my settling guide for your baby?s age. You should throw all her ' dummies in the bin to ensure you are not tempted to use them again – even outside sleep times.
  • * 2008 , Bern, Bern's Fairy Tales , page 15,
    • No Fairy baby has ever been seen to suck its thumb or to use a dummy .
  • * 2011 , Simone Cave, Caroline Fertleman, Baby to Toddler Month by Month , page 85,
    • We?ve found that going cold turkey works best – you check that your baby isn't ill or teething, then throw all dummies' away. When your baby cries for her ' dummy , you can look her in the eye and say, ‘It?s gone,’ and really mean it.
  • (card games, chiefly, bridge) A player whose hand is shown and is to be played from by another player.
  • (UK) A bodily gesture meant to fool an opposing player in sport; a feint.
  • * {{quote-news
    • , year=2011 , date=January 12 , author=Saj Chowdhury , title=Liverpool 2 - 1 Liverpool , work=BBC citation , page= , passage=Raul Meireles was the victim of the home side's hustling on this occasion giving the ball away to the impressive David Vaughan who slipped in Taylor-Fletcher. The striker sold Daniel Agger with the best dummy of the night before placing his shot past keeper Pepe Reina.}}
  • (linguistics) A word serving only to make a construction grammatical.
    • The pronoun "it" in "It's a mystery why this happened" is a dummy .
  • (programming) An unused parameter or value.
    • If flag1 is false, the other parameters are dummies .

    Synonyms

    * (a thing in the form of a person) mannequin, marionette * (plastic teat) pacifier (US), soother (Canada)

    Derived terms

    * dummy bid * dummy bidder

    Related terms

    * dumb

    See also

    * dud * fake * feint

    External links

    * http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002594.php

    Verb

  • To make a mock-up or prototype version of something, without some or all off its intended functionality.
    • The carpenters dummied some props for the rehearsals.
  • To feint
  • * {{quote-news
    • , year=2011 , date=February 1 , author=Mandeep Sanghera , title=Man Utd 3 - 1 Aston Villa , work=BBC citation , page= , passage=The more glamorous qualities usually associated with him are skill and pace and he used those to race on to a ball across him and dummy a defender before having a right-foot shot saved. }}
  • * {{quote-news
    • , year=2011 , date=January 15 , author=Kevin Darling , title=West Ham 0 - 3 Arsenal , work=BBC citation , page= , passage=For the first, the 30-year-old allowed Walcott space on the right to send in a pass that was expertly dummied by Samir Nasri, allowing Van Persie to swivel and smash right-footed past Robert Green. }}

    Derived terms

    * dummy out * dummy up