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What's the difference between a goblin and a hobgoblin?
While a goblin is often portrayed in folklore as a grotesque, evil, and malicious creature, a hobgoblin tends to traffic more in mischief than malice. (The character Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream might be regarded as a hobgoblin.) First appearing in English in the early 16th century, hobgoblin combined hob, a word meaning "sprite" or "elf" that derived from Hobbe, a nickname for Robert, with goblin a word ultimately from the Greek word kobalos, meaning "rogue." American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson famously applied the word's extended sense in his essay Self-Reliance: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
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Examples of hobgoblin in a Sentence
Denise Petski, Deadline, 2 July 2024
Sightings of the mythical Nain Rouge, a red hobgoblin or dwarf that appears on the eve of tragedy, date to Detroit's origin — and locals have reclaimed the spirit with an annual march to scare the demon away, according to tradition.
—Detroit Free Press, 24 Mar. 2024
As Ralph Waldo Emerson might have said in an essay of the same name (and did), a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; Tommy seems to feel his brain shrinking along with his life.
—John Anderson, WSJ, 9 Jan. 2024
Consistency is the hobgoblin of large language models.
—Brianne Kane, Scientific American, 29 Sep. 2023
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Cite this Entry
“Hobgoblin.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hobgoblin. Accessed 21 Nov. 2024.
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hobgoblin
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