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Allin

thingy

nounpronounadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈθɪŋiː//
  • United States//ˈθɪŋi//

A thing (used to refer to something vaguely or when one cannot recall or does not wish to mention its name).

noun

  1. 1

    informalA thing (used to refer to something vaguely or when one cannot recall or does not wish to mention its name).

    And as soon as that temperature returns to normal, let’s talk about the thingies that go through your headie at night.

    What I should really do, of course, is use a Personal Digital Assistant; one of those tiny hand-held computerette thingies […]

    The incorporated technology is based on absolutely serious alt-fact science—that old familiar Einsteiny, time dilation thingy only in reverse— which also forms the basis of much of LaLa Valley's tech AI prowess.

  2. 2

    slangA penis.

    He pulled out his thingy. It was huge.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *tenk-? Proto-Indo-European *tenkóm Proto-Germanic *þingą Proto-West Germanic *þing Old English þing Middle English thing English thing Old English -iġ Middle English -y English -y English thingy From thing + -y (diminutive suffix).

pronoun

  1. 1

    informalA person whose name one cannot recall.

    He reminds me of thingy from that film.

adjective

  1. 1

    Resembling or characteristic of a thing; tangible.

    The most unpleasant, and also the thingiest, the central thing in Foreign Parts, was a giant banyan tree, putting out more and more suckers which created tangled arches, a swollen hiding-place of a tree, a series of organic traps, […]

    The secret of even the thingiest SF, the most solid-walnut-to-the-knuckles fantasy, is that you don't need much to summon worlds out of air, so long as the details are the right ones.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *tenk-? Proto-Indo-European *tenkóm Proto-Germanic *þingą Proto-West Germanic *þing Old English þing Middle English thing English thing Proto-Indo-European *-kos Proto-Germanic *-gaz Proto-West Germanic *-g Old English -iġ Middle English -y English -y English thingy From thing + -y (adjectival suffix).

Forms

plural
thingies
comparative
thingier
superlative
thingiest
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).