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Barbie

proper nounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɑːbi//
  • United States//ˈbɑɹbi//

A diminutive of the female given name Barbara.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A diminutive of the female given name Barbara.

Etymology

From Barbara + -ie.

noun

  1. 1

    A tall, slender female fashion doll.

    They discourage their young children from engaging in rough-and-tumble play. One mother said, “I like Hai-Mei quiet. I like her playing Barbies, writing, and singing.”

    Everything short of the toe-to-toe Truth and Love that comes from real confrontation of individual consciousness is just playing with Barbie dolls.

    Sarah, who is ten, says she doesn’t play with Barbies anymore, although she takes a certain scientific interest[…].

    Many of my feminist friends hate Barbie because they feel that she sends a terrible message to girls […]

  2. 2

    informalA beautiful but stupid or shallow young woman.

    I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world / Life in plastic, it's fantastic / You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere / Imagination, life is your creation

    After the ceremony, the "Barbies and Kens" (excluding Tommy and Britney) gathered at Lindsay's mansion to have a barbeque party. They laughed and talked about good times and vowed to remain friends forever.

Etymology

Named for Barbara Handler-Segal, daughter of Mattel co-founder Elliot Handler, in 1959.

Forms

plural
Barbies
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).