Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Something whose name is unknown or forgotten.
  • noun A person regarded as stupid.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Something whose name is either unknown or forgotten; a thingamajig.
  • noun A fool or incompetent person.
  • noun slang, vulgar penis

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Dutch dinges, whatchamacallit, from German Dings, from Middle High German dinges, genitive of dinc, thing, from Old High German ding, thing, assembly, case, thing.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Dutch dinges, ding ("thing").

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Examples

Comments

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  • "They were two unarmed, uniformed members of the maggoty old Big Apple's Finest, standing in a well-lit air-conditioned hallway on the twenty-sixth floor of a brand-new apartment building - or maybe it was a condo, who the fuck knew, when Officers Cautious and Extremely were boys, a condo was something a guy with a speech impediment wore on the end of his dingus - and no one was going to creep up on them or jump out of the ceiling on top of them or hose them down with a magic Uzi that never jammed or never ran out of ammunition."

    - 'The Dark Half', Stephen King.

    December 31, 2007

  • A probably related word is "dinkus," a typographer's symbol used to separate sections of a book within a chapter.

    August 7, 2010