thought bubble
2
4.1
- noun
- /θɔt ˈbʌbəl/
:
burbuja de pensamiento
- In the comic strip, a thought bubble appeared, showing the character's true feelings about the situation.
- speech and thought bubble
And then there's like a thought bubble above it and it says drop a thought.
- And then there's like a thought bubble above it and it says drop a thought.
- And frankly, even with the nice folks, if we could see that thought bubble above nice folks heads, my guess is it would not be fit for prime time.
Examples
-
As she spoke, a thought bubble emerged, illustrating the doubts running through her mind.
-
"When I look at other people, I automatically form thought bubbles over their heads."
Blog text (25) -
I walk around my small, picturesque town with a thought bubble over my head: "Person Going Through A Divorce."
Blog text (25) -
The bank employees' thought bubbles show them holding him upside down by his feet and shaking the money out of his pockets.
Blog text (28) -
I saw a funny cartoon about German banks once, where the customer walks in with a thought bubble showing him wearing a crown, and the employees are treating him like royalty.
Blog text (28) -
The final recto of the picture book depicts the Bear communicating his involvement (visually through a thought bubble) in Ella's "Once upon a time" story to a captivated audience of characters from the story world of the notebook.
Academic text (2014) -
The artist drew a thought bubble above the hero's head to reveal what he was thinking during the battle.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a cloud-like balloon showing unspoken thoughts' is directly derivable from combining 'thought' (an idea) with 'bubble' (a rounded enclosure), since bubbles are a common visual device in comics to represent speech or ideas. This noun-noun compound follows straightforward compositional logic that is cross-linguistically familiar, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would likely understand it.
Etymology
Thought bubble comes from cartoons where artists draw a cloud-like bubble above a character's head to show the character's thoughts. So today a thought bubble means the drawn shape that shows 'what someone is thinking'.