RIP VAN WINKLE • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Rip van Winkle

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/rɪp væn wˈɪŋkəl/ Listen

Rip van Winkle

noun

A person oblivious to social changes.

A person who sleeps a lot.

The title character in a story by Washington Irving about a man who sleeps for 20 years and doesn't recognize the world when he wakens.

See images of 'Rip van Winkle'

Etymology of 'Rip van Winkle'

Share |

"Rip van winkle" Quotes from Famous Books

... Cave, famous in the Middle Ages of Christianity (Gibbon chaps. xxxiii.), is an article of faith with Moslems, being part subject of chapter xviii., the Koranic Surah termed the Cave. These Rip Van Winkle-tales begin with Endymion so famous amongst the Classics and Epimenides of Crete who slept fifty-seven years; and they extend to modern days as La Belle au Bois dormant. The Seven Sleepers are as many youths of Ephesus (six royal councillors ...

— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... the men who do one thing in this world who come to the front. Who is the favorite actor? It is a Jefferson, who devotes a lifetime to a "Rip Van Winkle," a Booth, an Irving, a Kean, who plays one character until he can play it better than any other man living, and not the shallow players who impersonate all parts. The great man is the one who never steps outside of his specialty or ...

— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... the Academy on March 29, 1858, with Mme. Lagrange in the principal rle, but the score was already a dozen years old, and it is not likely that the composer's state of health would have permitted him to undertake the writing of a new opera even if he had been so disposed. Mr. Bristow's "Rip Van Winkle," which had a production in New York in the year of Ole Bull's announcement, may, for all that I know to the contrary, have been written for the prize. The scheme of uniting a training school for singers with an opera house was not heard of again, so far as I can ...

— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... called from the bow. "Look! There's the same old steamer tied to the same old bank. We've been gone a year, and yet the world hasn't changed a mite. I wonder if Hazleton has taken a Rip van Winkle sleep all ...

— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... Willis and the New England Magazine is very notable in the history of American literature. The traditions of that literature were grave and even sombre. Irving, indeed, in his Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, and in the general gayety of his literary touch, had emancipated it from strict allegiance to the solemnity of its precedents, and had lighted it with a smile. He supplied a quality of grace and cheerfulness which it had lacked, and without ...

— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

More quotes...