1 a person who does crazy things that are often dangerous:
This lunatic in a white van pulled out right in front of me!
2 (old-fashioned) a person who is severely mentally ill (the use of this word is now offensive):
a dangerous / homicidal lunatic
ORIGIN Originally from the Latin lunaticus (luna = moon), because people believed that the changes in the moon caused temporary madness.
adjective crazy, ridiculous or extremely stupid:
lunatic ideas * a lunatic smile
IDIOMS
the lunatic fringe noun [sing.+sing./pl.v.] (disapproving) those members of a political or other group whose views are considered to be very extreme and crazy:
They stressed that only the lunatic fringe of the movement was involved in the incident.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for lunatic is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is lunatic a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, lunatic is tagged as noun.
Does lunatic appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — lunatic appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
