pencil-necked
- adjective
- /ˈpɛnslˌnɛkt/
- Offensive
- Despite his pencil-necked appearance, he surprised everyone with his strength during the competition.
Examples
-
I'm going to listen to some pencil-necked butthead tell me I don't know how to relate to you...
Fiction book (1992) -
An inexperienced pencil-necked public defender shuffles papers. Jim
Fiction book (1995) -
Ibrahim might be a little pencil-necked geek, but the dude had real balls, dicking with a bomb like this.
Fiction book (1991) -
Apparently, simply reporting what hundreds of other people have discovered now makes me a pencil-necked geek in your book, because a politically based study which you consider to be "scientific" has been trashed by later research.
Blog text (34) -
Fox News puts up a stooge like Colmes to provide a smarmy, pencil-necked, pin-headed stereotype as an amusing foil to whatever the conservatives have to say.
Blog text (8) -
He always made fun of his pencil-necked classmates, teasing them for looking weak.
-
The pencil-necked young man struggled to carry the heavy boxes at the moving company.
Synonyms
Very thin and weak in a way that looks unhealthy
Very thin person with little or no fat
Thin so you can see or feel the bones
Antonyms
How Thin
Surface Forms
Morphology
pencil-necked = pencil-neck (transparent) = pencil + neck + ed
The compound 'pencil-neck' (pencil + neck) is clear and the suffix '-ed' forms an adjective meaning 'having a neck like a pencil'.
Etymology
Pencil-necked joins pencil and neck to make a picture of a neck 'as thin as a pencil'. That's why it is an informal insult that says someone looks weak or not very strong.