Ninny

July 2nd, 2011 by admin

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7 comments on this post.

  1. Simon:

    August 3rd, 2011 at 4:45 pm

    I’d always assumed “ninny” was short for “nincompoop”. But when I compare the dates here to the ones in your old article on “nincompoop”, it looks like “ninny” predates it by a few decades.

  2. Bill:

    September 6th, 2011 at 5:52 pm

    When i was younger the term ninny was defined as you say but was always taken to also mean a breast, as with boob having the same double meaning, Did I make this up ar soes anyone else recall this same double entendre?

  3. Hannah:

    July 24th, 2013 at 11:01 pm

    That is what my mother and her mother used for breast/ breast milk. Which is what led me to this site trying to figure out how they came up with that!

  4. Ian William johnson:

    May 6th, 2017 at 6:49 am

    Ninny meaning “breast” comes from the French “néné”

  5. Stephen:

    April 23rd, 2020 at 2:40 pm

    First I’ll work ‘hammerhead’ into an inter-office memo, from there I’ll ease in ‘ninnyhammer’.

  6. Carol:

    February 8th, 2022 at 11:32 am

    Thanks for clearing up the meaning of the word “ninny“. My mother used to refer to it as having to do with the breast, so I was really confused. It makes sense that it comes from the French.

  7. Dave:

    May 9th, 2022 at 5:32 am

    I too assumed that ninny was an abbreviation of nincompoop, which always looked like a very silly word to me.
    Ninnies was a word used by my contemporaries which was used to refer to nipples, not breasts per se.
    You live and learn!

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