Wordsmith Shashi Tharoor strikes again, adds 'Quockerwodger' to his 'Tharoorosaurus'

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who is well-known for throwing in rarely-used, often difficult-to-pronounce English words on the Internet, posted another head-scratcher word on Wednesday.

'Quockerwodger,' wrote Tharoor on Twitter.

The 66-year-old was kind enough to share the meaning of the word as well. "A useful addition to our political vocabulary!? Quockerwodger," Tharoor tweeted along with a picture.


"A quockerwodger was a type of wooden puppet. In politics, a quockerwodger was a politician acting on the instructions of an influential third party, rather than properly representing their constituents," he said.

The difficult-to-pronounce word dates back to 1860.


This is not the first time that the man of many words has sent Twitterati scurrying for their dictionaries to confirm whether such a word indeed exists.

Last year, Tharoor took a dig at the BJP with the word 'allodoxaphobia', which he explained was an irrational fear of opinions.

Before that, the politician engaged in a friendly banter with TRS working president KT Rama Rao over Covid-19 medicine names where he casually threw in the obscure 'floccinaucinihilipilification'.

Oxford dictionary describes 'floccinaucinihilipilification' as the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.

And how can we forget about the times when he stumped people with words such as 'farrago' and 'troglodyte'. With the word 'farrago', Tharoor became an instant hit with the netizens.

The word means “a confused mixture” which was originally a Latin word for mixed fodder, and the word was adopted into the English language in the early 1600s, whereas a 'troglodyte' means a person regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.