(US, informal) An old-fashioned, persnickety or ineffective person.
(US, informal) An old-fashioned, persnickety or ineffective person.
My grandma is a fuddy-duddy when it comes to keeping her house clean.
Fuddy-duddy is an old-fashioned term for a person who is conservative, dull, or fussy about rules. Not concerning, just descriptive vocabulary. If your kid uses it constantly, ask them where they first heard it, not to police their speech but to understand which online community they are in. Most slang of this kind moves through TikTok and group chats, so seeing it in your child's vocabulary just means they are plugged into normal teen internet culture.
Fuddy-duddy is an old-fashioned term for a person who is conservative, dull, or fussy about rules. Not concerning, just descriptive vocabulary. If your kid uses it constantly, ask them where they first heard it, not to police their speech but to understand which online community they are in. Most slang of this kind moves through TikTok and group chats, so seeing it in your child's vocabulary just means they are plugged into normal teen internet culture.
Slang is read by different audiences for very different reasons. The For parents view re-explains the term in plain, non-judgemental language so a caregiver can understand what their child means without needing the surrounding subculture. The For English learners view focuses on register (when it's safe to use), formal alternatives, and common mistakes — what a textbook won't teach you.
Add your own interpretation of "fuddy-duddy".
The aesthetic vocabulary of how people dress now — quiet luxury, coquette, mob wife, coastal grandmother, Y2K core, and every "-core" that came after.
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Fuddy-duddy is informal English describing a person who is conservative, old-fashioned, or fussy. Use in casual writing. Formal equivalents: "a conservative person," "a stick-in-the-mud." Common non-native mistake: hyphenation. Standard form is "fuddy-duddy" (hyphenated). Often used affectionately or mildly mockingly. Read or listen to the word in context several times before trying it yourself; the right register is harder to learn than the dictionary meaning.
“05. **[^](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuddy-duddy#cite_ref-5 "Jump up")**["the definition of fuddy-duddy"](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fuddy-duddy). _Dictionary.com Unabridged_. [Random House, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_House,_Inc.”
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(US, informal) Old-fashioned and persnickety or ineffective.
Kingsolver lives by the tenets of her public-spirited fictional characters, whom she sculpts with a keen eye for individuality, e.g. Nannie Land Rawley, a seventy-something orchardist who shocks a fuddy-duddy male neighbor by wearing sho…
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