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Wooden spoon   /wˈʊdən spun/   Listen
adjective
Wooden  adj.  
1.
Made or consisting of wood; pertaining to, or resembling, wood; as, a wooden box; a wooden leg; a wooden wedding.
2.
Clumsy; awkward; ungainly; stiff; spiritless. "When a bold man is out of countenance, he makes a very wooden figure on it." "His singing was, I confess, a little wooden."
Wooden spoon.
(a)
(Cambridge University, Eng.) The last junior optime who takes a university degree, denoting one who is only fit to stay at home and stir porridge. "We submit that a wooden spoon of our day would not be justified in calling Galileo and Napier blockheads because they never heard of the differential calculus."
(b)
In some American colleges, the lowest appointee of the junior year; sometimes, one especially popular in his class, without reference to scholarship. Formerly, it was a custom for classmates to present to this person a wooden spoon with formal ceremonies.
Wooden ware, a general name for buckets, bowls, and other articles of domestic use, made of wood.
Wooden wedding. See under Wedding.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wooden spoon" Quotes from Famous Books



... all filled with sweet, rich milk, covered with thick, yellow cream. Here she took down her pail; and first she filled a large jug with the new milk for breakfast. She then poured all the rest into two or three pans, like the others on the shelf. Next, she took a flat wooden spoon, and skimmed the cream off several of the others, and poured it all into a square wooden machine, called a churn. It had a handle which turned round. She threw in some salt, and then began to turn the handle round and round, and it turned a wheel inside, and the wheel beat and splashed the cream ...
— Adventure of a Kite • Harriet Myrtle

... father and his friends were meantime gathered round a table drinking small beer (Kalja) from large wooden pots, or rather buckets, called haarikka. Each man helped himself out of the haarikka by dipping into that vessel the usual wooden spoon and sipping its contents, after which performance he replaced ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... Another utensil is made of earthenware; this is the ordinary cooking pot used in the houses of the poor. Brass spoons of different sizes are used for stirring the contents of the different cooking utensils, also a wooden spoon. ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... If the long-haired, shambling, shrill fanatic upon the platform be a contemptuous jest to my Lady Cavaliere, this fairer lady remembers John clad in goat-skins and crying in the wilderness. I wish, she says, that mankind might sit at a sumptuous table, but I shall not scoff at the wooden spoon that feeds its hunger. She hangs one picture upon her wall: it is Christ sitting at meat with publicans and sinners. And so season after season, year after year, she carries her sympathy, her hope, her steady faith to all the pioneers. She is not a poet, but the world is to her ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... such right of estray, the shepherd of each township attends the court, and does fealty by bringing to the court a large apple-pie and a twopenny sweet cake, except the shepherd of Hewick, who compounds by paying sixteenpence for ale (which is drunk as aftermentioned) and a wooden spoon; each pie is cut in two, and divided by the bailiff, one half between the steward, bailiff, and the tenant of a coney warren, and the other half into six parts, and divided amongst the six shepherds of the beforementioned ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton


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