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puppet

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpʌpɪt//
  • New Zealand//ˈpɐpət//
  • //ˈpʊpɪt//

Any small model of a person or animal able to be moved by strings or rods, or in the form of a glove.

noun

  1. 1

    Any small model of a person or animal able to be moved by strings or rods, or in the form of a glove.

  2. 2

    figurativeA person, country, etc, controlled by another.

    These men , from no worse motive that could be discovered than a thirst after knowledge beyond their sphere , committed burglary upon the barn in which the puppets had been consigned to repose

    Every act of a Roman, from birth to death, from dawn to night, was controlled and supervised by some presiding deity. Man was thus virtually a symbolic puppet in the hands of the Roman pantheon.

  3. 3

    obsoleteA poppet; a small image in the human form; a doll.

  4. 4

    The upright support for the bearing of the spindle in a lathe.

Etymology

From Middle English popet, probably from, though attested earlier than, Middle French poupette, diminutive of poupée (cf. also Medieval Latin *pupata), ultimately derived from Latin pupa (“doll, puppet; girl”). The nominal form first appears c. 1531, and the verbal form c. 1635. See also puppy.

verb

  1. 1

    figurativeTo control or manipulate like a puppet.

Forms

plural
puppets
past tense
puppeted
past participle
puppeted
present participle
puppeting
third person singular
puppets
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).