20 Old Words for Ignorant People

When it first came into English in the 1150s, idiot meant “uneducated, ignorant person.” It wasn’t long before the term was being applied to people with intellectual disabilities “as [a] technical [descriptor] in medical, educational, and regulatory contexts,” according to Merriam-Webster. The use of idiot in that sense is considered offensive today. But there are plenty of other old words and phrases you can use for people who have no common sense without offending anyone (other than them, at least). Here are a few you might want to add to your lexicon.

Apparently a variant of blockhead, that old Charlie Brown-ism, this term has been around since the early 1900s. The first known use is from Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian: “He’s one of those box-head jokers goes around openin’ and shuttin’ doors that-a-way.” Boxhead is also a close relative of bonehead .

While muppet is, of course, a word for the puppets created by Jim Henson, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) also has a less-than-positive definition that popped up some five decades after Henson coined it: “An incompetent or ineffectual person; an idiot. Also (with less derogatory force): someone enthusiastic but inept; a person prone to mishaps through naivety.” Here’s a self-deprecating use from London’s The Guardian in 1989 : “I’m a muppet. In fact, I’m definitely a muppet. I couldn’t find the entrance to the restaurant that night for a start.”

This phrase is a euphemism for a horse’s ass. The first known use is from Jerome Weidman’s 1943 book The Lights Around the Shore: “You, you overgrown little horse’s patoot, you have the crust, the nerve, the gall, to sit there fiddling with the stem of a wrist watch.” You can also call someone a “horse’s patootie . ”

Here’s another from the lengthy list of head-related insults. Muffin-head has been in print since at least this 1892 use in The History of David Grieve by Mrs. Humphry Ward: “Yo good-for-nowt, yo muffin-yed, yo donkey!” A 1997 use in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer shows the term may not be quite extinct: “Zelda, you muffinhead, don’t tell me you’ve been suckered into the trendy toy trap again.”

Poet Benjamin Jonson used this term in a 1631 poem: “I haue a husband,..But such a moon-ling, as no wit of man Or roses can redeeme from being an Asse.” Perhaps the moon is associated with foolishness because it’s in the sky, and the alleged moonling has their head in the clouds rather than anywhere in the vicinity of Earth.

Nana , short for banana, was ‘60s slang for a foolish person. The term appears in Graham Campbell McInnes’s 1965 book The Road to Gundagai : “Although he was obviously a gent, he was not a ‘tonk’ or a ‘nana’.” High praise, indeed. ( Tonk is a term from Australia and New Zealand for a person who is overprivileged, obnoxious, or a fool.)

This term , which dates back to the 1400s, is pretty much self-defining: a wantwit lacks wit, and therefore common sense. An 1837 example from the Scottish National Dictionary uses a few other terms for those short on sense: “Her brother David was rather a wanwit or sillie-daft man.” Them’s fighting words.

Taken literally, this term refers to a cake made from dough, but it’s also been used as an insult. The first known use is from the 1794 book A Dialogue in the Devonshire Dialect by Mary Palmer: “ How unvitty and cat-handed you go about it, you dough-cake.”

According to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, this variation of dork may have a relation to beer—specifically, to Dortmünder Union Pils . (The idea is that people who drink a lot of beer don’t make the best decisions.) The term has been recorded since 1989, when it showed up in Slang U.: The Official Dictionary of College Slang by Pamela Munro: “My lab partner’s a total dorkmunder.”

Stupex means “a stupid person,” and its origins, according to the OED, are unclear: “Perhaps a humorous alteration of either stupid … or stupe … after classical Latin nouns ending in ‑ex , e.g. senex old man.” The term has been around since at least the mid-1800s.

This colorful word , which sounds like something Lewis Carroll came up with, can either refer to a foolish person or that foolish person’s head. Its meaning is very close to numbskull , and it has a rarer variation meaning “general stupidity”: jobbernowlism .

There’s something delightful about reduplicative words like jibber-jabber , higgledy-piggledy , choo-choo , and niddy-noddy . In the 1600s, the latter term referred to an involuntary dropping (nodding) of the head, kind of like when you fall asleep on an airplane, then jolt yourself awake. By the 1700s, it was used to refer to a fool.

Originally, stookie was plaster, then came to refer to a type of wax statue or other dummy—which made for a smooth transition to people who don’t display much wit and wisdom. You can see that statuesque influence in this 1948 use from The Aberdeen Press and Journal : “ The civic representatives all standing like ‘stookies’ as they had not got the words of the Psalm they were singing.”

This term isn’t totally out of use, and it does have a positive sense of “crossword or jigsaw puzzle enthusiast.” But since the early 1800s, a puzzlehead has also been a person who is confused, as if their mind were a Jenga game that went on a little too long.

The original meaning for this term was a clown—and it’s a slippery slope from buffoonery that entertains to buffoonery that annoys. This 1910 use from H.H. Richardson’s Getting of Wisdom shows the term’s sense of “fool, jester”: “She grew cautious, and hesitated discreetly before returning one of those ingenuous answers, which, in the beginning, had made her the merry-andrew of the class.”

In the 1500s, dizzard was another word for jester . Since jesters were also called “fools,” it’s no wonder the word—which was apparently a play on dizzy —quickly came to mean “blockhead.”

You might be familiar with dunderhead , but you probably don’t know its forgotten sibling dunderwhelp , which is likely a combination of a Dutch pejorative with English.

Pate , an old word for the head, opened a lot of doors when it comes to naming people with zero sense. In addition to clod-pate —meaning “thick head” or “block head”—other insults include jolter-pate , muddle-pate , rattle-pate , and shallow-pate . The latter term was used in a sexism-skewering sentence from 1930 in Time & Tide magazine: “To confound the shallow-pates who complained that a suffragist must be a dowd, the leader of the W.S.P.U. appeared on platforms clothed in Paris frocks.”

The origin of this 17th-century Scottish word is uncertain, but it can be used to refer to either a fool or someone who’s quite surly.

Ninnyhammer , meaning “fool” or “braggart,” dates from the late 1500s; this 1622 poem by Samuel Rowlands voices a self-deprecating regret: “I might haue beene a scholler, learn'd my Grammar, But I haue lost all like a Ninnie-hammer.” Some heroic writers still use this term, like Colby Cosh in McLean’s who in 2015 dismissed some economists like so: “Goggle-eyed ninnyhammers, the lot of ’em!”

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A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated and expanded for 2024.