Pickwickian

views updated May 23 2018

Pickwickian of or like Mr Pickwick in Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1837), especially in being jovial, plump, or generous.

Pickwickian can also refer to a word being used misunderstood or misused, especially to avoid offence. (This derives from a passage in Pickwick Papers, in which, responding to an enquiry as to whether an expression had been used ‘in a common sense’, the response is given that the speaker ‘had used the word in its Pickwickian sense’.)