Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A commotion; a disturbance.
- noun A state of nervous activity; a fuss.
- noun A cloud of smoke or dust that chokes or smothers.
- intransitive verb To make confused; trouble; worry.
- intransitive verb To be overly concerned with trifles; fuss.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A tumult; disturbance; confusion; bustle; flutter.
- To make a pother or bustle; make a stir.
- To harass and perplex; bother; puzzle; tease.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Bustle; confusion; tumult; flutter; bother.
- intransitive verb To make a bustle or stir; to be fussy.
- transitive verb To harass and perplex; to worry.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
commotion , atempest .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an excited state of agitation
- verb make upset or troubled
- verb make a fuss; be agitated
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The damsel, now-a-days, who marries a lad younger than herself, is laying up a large stock of pother, which is to bother her when she becomes thirty -- for even young ladies, you know, after forty, may become thirty.
Confession, or, the Blind Heart; a Domestic Story William Gilmore Simms 1838
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At the poem's centre is a debate about "exact thinking", and how such thinking translates into action, and whether emotion as opposed to reason is ever a justifiable ground for action, and whether action is ever worth it in the first place - though of course if were to be so, then it must first be based on absolutely exact thinking - and, as any sensible reader will swiftly deduce, this is exactly the sort of over-analytical "pother" (Claude's word) which is most discouraging to a woman who might be inclined to think that you might be inclined to be in love with her.
Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk 2009
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Therefore we have on hand an IBM Selectric for addressing envelopes and writing notes without the pother of computer printers.
Red Room: Fran Moreland Johns: Your Stuff as 'Art' Red Room 2011
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Therefore we have on hand an IBM Selectric for addressing envelopes and writing notes without the pother of computer printers.
Red Room: Fran Moreland Johns: Your Stuff as 'Art' Red Room 2011
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Therefore we have on hand an IBM Selectric for addressing envelopes and writing notes without the pother of computer printers.
Red Room: Fran Moreland Johns: Your Stuff as 'Art' Red Room 2011
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Therefore we have on hand an IBM Selectric for addressing envelopes and writing notes without the pother of computer printers.
Red Room: Fran Moreland Johns: Your Stuff as 'Art' Red Room 2011
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There was no reason, really, why we shouldn't have bowled off publicly, but the less pother the better.
Isabelle Estelle Bruno 2010
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Each would be giving their own different Lewis Carroll take on the world to the pother and despite not listening, each would be convinced the other was in complete agreement with himself.
Smoking Guns and the Morality of Parliamentary Privilege 2009
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This has caused quite a pother amidst the right-wing punditocracy as you can well imagine, especially El Gordo.
Lionel: Obama in Cairo: The Immutable Sapience of the Good Book(s) 2009
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The rare junk is not the information that it happened – something that is in reality one mildly surprising – but the pother its disclosure is creating.
rawles commented on the word pother
A synonym for bother. Nothing will ever make me believe that this was not the result of someone typoing and then being too proud to admit it.
May 23, 2007
slumry commented on the word pother
Hm. . ."bother" apparently predates "pother" by a century or two, and both predate typwriters. Any what kind of word is "typoing" anyway?
June 14, 2007
rawles commented on the word pother
Typoing is a made up word. Facetious, however, is not.
June 19, 2007