Walter Mitty
1
9.2
- proper noun
- /ˈwɔltər ˈmɪti/
- Everyone called him a Walter Mitty because he spent hours daydreaming about being a famous explorer.
Examples
-
The new recruit was quickly nicknamed Walter Mitty because of his unbelievable stories about secret missions.
-
Ever since he was a child, Tom has been a bit of a Walter Mitty, always drifting off into heroic fantasies.
-
She described her brother as a Walter Mitty, happier in his own imagined world than in reality.
-
He is such a Walter Mitty with his wild stories about saving the world.
-
Don't be a Walter Mitty and start living in reality!
-
In the film, the character of Walter Mitty imagines himself as a heroic adventurer in thrilling scenarios.
-
Her friends teased her for being such a Walter Mitty, always lost in her fantasies of fame and fortune.
Synonyms
3
8.4
A person who often imagines things that are not real or likely
1
3.3
A person who often imagines things instead of paying attention
Surface Forms
Morphology
Walter + Mitty
This is a proper name derived from a fictional character (James Thurber's Walter Mitty); the individual constituents 'Walter' and 'Mitty' are personal names with no semantic content that would cue the meaning 'a daydreaming fantasist'. The sense is a cultural/corpus-specific reference that learners must have encountered to understand, so it is not derivable from the parts.
Etymology
Walter Mitty comes from a short story by James Thurber about a quiet man who often escapes into big daydreams. Because he imagines himself as a brave hero while his real life is ordinary, we now call someone a Walter Mitty when they are full of 'daydreams' or live in an 'imagined world'.