Definition of milquetoast
: a timid, meek, or unassertive person
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milquetoast was our Word of the Day on 05/26/2016. Hear the podcast!
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Recent Examples of milquetoast from the Web
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Make Dolores the uncompromising leader of the burgeoning robot uprising—with actual, permanent stakes for the park and its hosts and guests—and leave the quibbling to milquetoasts like Teddy.
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His milquetoast Light Beer 007 probably won't excite drinkers chasing trendy IPAs, but the ale showcases the broad-strokes flavors of pale malt and bright hops in an approachable way.
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In the midst of all this, the NCAA is perceived as a milquetoast organization unwilling to be aggressive with the offenders.
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Key players remain maddeningly passive — Gleeson isn’t the most dynamic of actors to begin with, and his Milne is a mumbling milquetoast, moping about with his hands in his pockets, as if work-shopping Eeyore.
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After all, the milquetoast reforms that the party cannot even pass wouldn’t make much of a dent in our problem, which is, in a macro sense, a crisis of handguns and suicides, not assault weapons and mass shootings.
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In Florida, our plants and our weather are boisterously confrontational, but the seasonal changes are milquetoasts.
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Today, more than half of the cars and trucks for sale boast as much power or more, including the milquetoast Kia Sorento.
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Though he was maligned as a milquetoast patsy, Alan Colmes’s run as the original Fox News liberal looks better in retrospect.
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'milquetoast.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Why is it milquetoast, and not milk toast?
Caspar Milquetoast was a comic strip character created in 1924 by the American cartoonist Harold T. Webster. The strip, called "The Timid Soul," ran every Sunday in the New York Herald Tribune for many years. Webster, who claimed that Milquetoast was a self-portrait, summed up the character as "the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick." The earliest examples for Milquetoast used as a generic synonym for "timid person" date from the mid-1930s. Caspar's last name might remind you of "milk toast," a bland concoction of buttered toast served in a dish of warm milk.
Origin and Etymology of milquetoast
Caspar Milquetoast, comic strip character created by H. T. Webster †1952 American cartoonist
Seen and Heard
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