Definition of dunce
: a slow-witted or stupid person
From the M-W Editors
Examples of dunce in a Sentence
people with the learning disability dyslexia were once simply dismissed as dunces
Recent Examples of dunce from the Web
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Reagan was famously called an amiable dunce, and that was unfair, but Reagan understood something [his predecessor] Carter did not.
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Delicate ceramic works—a dunce cap on a stool, a wall clock with no hands—evoke fragility.
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There are plenty of dunce caps to hand out at Harvard, but not for its maligned money managers.
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Unfortunately for their students, these demented dunces still don’t have their acts together.
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The next day, a New York tabloid put Manning’s face on its back page with a dunce cap perched atop his head.
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The Florida senator caricatured Mr. Trump as a dunce on policy who repeats five canned lines over and over, and said that Mr. Trump would have amounted to little without inheriting a fortune from his father.
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But step into their britches; to be smartphone-era dunces careening into the singularity must be excruciating.
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'dunce.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Did You Know?
The irony of dunce lies in the fact that this synonym of dullard is derived from the name of one of the most brilliant thinkers of the Middle Ages, John Duns Scotus. So ingenious were the theological and metaphysical speculations of this thinker that he was given the name “the Subtle Doctor.” However, in the 16th century, his followers became a conservative element in English universities, and they tended to resist the new learning of humanism. As result, dunsman and the shortened form duns (later respelled as we have it today), became terms of scorn, meaning first “sophist” or “pedant” and gradually taking on the modern sense “slow-witted person.”
Origin and Etymology of dunce
John Duns Scotus, whose once accepted writings were ridiculed in the 16th century
DUNCE Defined for English Language Learners
dunce
playDefinition of dunce for English Language Learners
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: someone who is stupid or slow at learning things
DUNCE Defined for Kids
Learn More about dunce
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See words that rhyme with dunce Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for dunce Spanish Central: Translation of dunce Nglish: Translation of dunce for Spanish speakers
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