sissy
/ˈsɪsi
/(British also cissy) informal
noun (plural sissies)
A person regarded as effeminate or cowardly: he would hate the other boys to think he was a sissy...
- Balsamic vinegar isn't just for sissies and wimps.
- The only items on the menu would be chicken-fried steak and beer, and anyone who tried to order vegetables would be laughed at and called a sissy.
- Don't be a sissy, go with him, his inner voice rebuked.
Synonyms
coward, weakling, milksop, Milquetoast, namby-pamby, crybaby, baby
informal weed, softie, nancy, nancy boy, pansy, ponce, mollycoddle, chicken
British informal wet, mummy's boy, big girl's blouse, jessie, yellow-belly, funk
North American informal pantywaist, cupcake, pussy
Australian/New Zealand informal sook
South African informal moffie
archaic poltroon
adjective (sissier, sissiest)
Feeble and cowardly.He deemed it necessary to make statements that conveyed the basic message that saving bunnies was wimpy, sissy stuff....
- It seems un-British, somehow, and we don't have cissy things like that.
- Well, I love to hear the throaty growl of the diesel engines as they warn vans and sissy pick-ups to get out of the way.
Synonyms
cowardly, weak, feeble, spineless, effeminate, effete, limp-wristed, womanish, unmanly, soft
informal wet, weedy, wimpish, wimpy, sissyish, queeny, sissified, swishy, yellow, yellow-bellied
North American informal candy-assed
Derivatives
sissified
- By the close of the nineteenth century, a recognizably masculine ideal had emerged in contradistinction to effeminate or sissified males.
- He has a soft sissified manner and voice.
- High jump, already sissified by the use of an airbed to land on instead of the traditional sandpit, will be banned altogether.
sissiness
- His fans insisted that his naturalism and his underplaying refuted any residual sissiness that might be associated with acting.
- It is sissiness that frightens, enrages and offends the men.
- I sat down with the only female recruiter in the office, in the hopes that she'd be less inclined to perceive my general sissiness than her male counterparts.
sissyish
- For him, all that dancing was a sissyish waste of calories.
- Their style was meant to symbolize tough, patriotic, working-class attitudes in contrast to the supposedly sissyish, pacifist, middle-class views of the hippies.
- Born in Ohio, he had an uneven boyhood, curiously dyslexic yet smart, sissyish in team sports but very competent athletically in individual competition.
Origin
Mid 19th century (in the sense 'sister'): from sis1 + -y2.
This was originally a pet form of sister (Old English) but soon came to be used in the sense ‘effeminate person, coward’.