Definitions

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

  • noun A person who is considered foolish or stupid.
  • noun A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A variety of salamander.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Pedagogy) A mentally retarded person whose intellectual development proceeds normally up to about the eighth year of age and is then arrested so that there is little or no further development; an adult having the mental development of an 8-to-12-year old. A moron is considered capable of doing routine work under supervision.
  • noun informal, derogatory Hence, a very stupid person.
  • noun An inferior olive size having a woody pulp and a large clingstone pit, growing in the mountainous and high-valley districts around the city of Moron, in Spain.

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

  • noun obsolete A person of borderline intelligence in the former classification of mental retardation, having of an intelligence quotient of 50-69.
  • noun informal A person who makes uncool, unfunny, uninteresting, or irrelevant (see lame) attempts to impress others and draw attention to himself, especially in a flawed attempt to act like someone else.
  • noun slang An idiot.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a city in Argentina, to the west of Buenos Aires
  • noun a person of subnormal intelligence

Etymologies

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

[From Greek mōron, neuter of mōros, stupid, foolish.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Ancient Greek μωρός (moros, "foolish").

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Examples

Comments

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  • Is he your husband?

    Or just your boyfriend?

    Is he the moron who's been beating you and keeping you inside?

    I've never done this kind of thing

    But if I kill him now, who's going to miss him?

    (I could be dreaming, by Belle and Sebastian)

    August 6, 2008

  • Apparently there's a technical definition: a person with an IQ between 50 and 70.

    July 1, 2009