Meaning of nodding acquaintance | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A casual or partial familiarity; a relationship which is not close or fully developed; an inexact understanding (of something).
   idiomatic, usually
2. Someone who is a remote or passing acquaintance.
   idiomatic

Equivalents

Examples

“None of the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a nodding acquaintance with them.”

“There isn't any doubt but that he had a nodding acquaintance with every pretty girl in town.”

“[A] Northwestern University psychologist reported, for what it was worth, a surprising finding: an average college-educated modern man has at least a nodding acquaintance with four times as many words as Shakespeare used.”

“A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.”

“[T]o reach Cattewater I must either fetch a circuit through purlieus where every householder knew me and every urchin was a nodding acquaintance, or make a straight dash.”

“He could not treat this scandalous matter in his own office. . . . Who was there he could go to? Linkman and Laver in Budge Row, perhaps—reliable, not too conspicuous, only nodding acquaintances.”

“[S]he knows only two of them as nodding acquaintances, and has never spoken to them privately.”

CEFR level