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Glite Dictionary
Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd

7 9.0
A barber who kills his customers in stories
  • proper noun
  • /ˈswiːni tɒd/
  • NSFW
: Sweeney Todd
  • In the musical, Sweeney Todd seeks revenge by killing his customers.

Examples

  • Everyone in town feared Sweeney Todd, the barber known for his deadly secret.

  • The story of Sweeney Todd combines dark humor with elements of horror.

  • He pointed to the board, I looked inside, and there was Sweeney Todd, and Mrs Lovett, chopping up Becky.

    Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)

Surface Forms

Sweeney Todd main

Morphology

Sweeney + Todd

This is a fixed proper name made of two surnames with no compositional lexical meaning; knowing the constituent tokens 'Sweeney' and 'Todd' (which are not semantically transparent words) does not allow a learner to infer 'fictional murderous barber'. Proper names are arbitrary labels for a specific cultural character, so the overall meaning is unpredictable from the parts.

Etymology

Sweeney Todd comes from a story about a barber who used a sharp razor to kill his customers and hide their bodies, and one famous detail says the bodies were even baked into meat pies. Because of this dark image, Sweeney Todd is now used to name a very bad or 'murderous' character in stories and culture.