Dictionary

nodding acquaintance en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (Australia) audio

Meanings

1. (followed by with, idiomatic, usually) A casual or partial familiarity; a relationship which is not close or fully developed; an inexact understanding (of something).
   • None of the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a nodding acquaintance with them. 1857, Wilkie Collins, chapter 5, in The Queen of Hearts:
   • There isn't any doubt but that he had a nodding acquaintance with every pretty girl in town. 1910, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter 10, in The Fortune Hunter:
   • A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. 2004 July 12, Bob Herbert, “Opinion: The Real Enemy Staring Us in the Face”, in New York Times, retrieved 08 May 2013:
   • [A] Northwestern University psychologist reported, for what it was worth, a surprising finding: an average college-educated modern man has at least a nodding acquaintance with four times as many words as Shakespeare used. 1940 April 22, “Education: Better than Shakespeare?”, in Time:
2. (idiomatic) Someone who is a remote or passing acquaintance.
   • [S]he knows only two of them as nodding acquaintances, and has never spoken to them privately. 2011 May 21, “Race-rigging scandal: We'll clear our names”, in Daily Mirror, UK, retrieved 09 May 2013:
   • He could not treat this scandalous matter in his own office. . . . Who was there he could go to? Linkman and Laver in Budge Row, perhaps—reliable, not too conspicuous, only nodding acquaintances. 1922, John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, part 3, ch. 5:
   • [T]o reach Cattewater I must either fetch a circuit through purlieus where every householder knew me and every urchin was a nodding acquaintance, or make a straight dash. 1903, Arthur Quiller-Couch, chapter 8, in The Adventures of Harry Revel:

Forms

Relateds

on nodding terms

Translations (3)

hu köszönőviszony (A casual or partial familiarity) · ru ша́почное знако́мство (A casual or partial familiarity) · hu futó/futólagos/felszínes/felületes ismeretség (A casual or partial familiarity)