stymie

Definitions  ·  Examples  ·  Pronunciations  ·  Etymologies  ·  Related  ·  Statistics  ·  Comments (4)  · 
“
I suppose some legal formality or other has cropped up and laid him a stymie, and he's waiting to get round it.

View all »
Definitions (8)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. transitive verb To thwart; stump: a problem in thermodynamics that stymied half the class.
  2. noun An obstacle or obstruction.
  3. noun Sports A situation in golf in which an opponent's ball obstructs the line of play of one's own ball on the putting green.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (2)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet (3)

Toggle elsewhere links Elsewhere on the web

View all »
Examples (50)

  • Sony has admitted to the Economist that certain Japanese executives tried to "stymie" his new vision for the Company.
  • The governor even managed to stymie the thing he didn't want: a tax swap that would have lowered the state's highest-in-the-nation 7 percent grocery tax and increased its third-lowest-in-the-nation 18-cent cigarette tax. —  Stateline.org RSS - stories
  • Democrats, who have 58 of the 100 seats in the Senate, will need at least two Republican votes in the Senate to avoid procedural roadblocks which could stymie the measure. —  Top Stories - Google News
  • If the U.S. Supreme Court takes the appeal, Friedman said that could stymie the state's plans to close Fernald and transfer its approximately 160 residents to other facilities. —  The Daily News Tribune Homepage RSS
  • The Jays almost made it 3-nil on a cross from Recker to Mauk at 1: 26; Bland had come out to grab the cross and failed but scrambled back in time to stymie Mauk. —  The Delphos Herald
More examples »
 

Tags

stymie hasn't been tagged yet.

Sign up or sign in to add tags.

Stats

This word has been looked up 144 times.

stop updating
On Twitter

Photos from

flickr images

Add a related word »
Related

Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Used in the same contextWord Family

stymie:   stymied
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Origin unknown.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. Origin obscure; perhaps connected with styme, stime, a glimpse, a transitory glance.
 

Pronunciations
Record your own »
/ˈStaɪmi/
by American Heritage

Charts
frequency chart

Bubble size: how much this word was used in a year

Bubble height: used more or less than expected, vs. all uses evenly distributed

You can expect to see this word a few times a year.

Recently looked up

p-value · brevity · poltroon · pathologist · pertinaciously

Recent Favorites

pygopagus · sanglant · Astacus · sweetbread · qualms

Recent Pronunciations

rimshot · qualms · poofter · oh for heaven's sake · embodies