thingy

noun

ˈthiŋ-ē 

variants or less commonly thingie

plural thingies

informal

: something that is hard to classify or whose name is unknown or forgotten : thing, thingamajig

During the session in May 1996, the geophysicist's instruments became the "yellow thingy" and the "red thingy," and the … dog became the "brown furry thing."

—M. Lee Goff

"I need a socket thingie," announces a very focused 13-year-old girl. Like a seasoned mechanic, 14-year-old Sophia Rogstad plucks a ratchet off the tool wall and passes it to her classmate.

—Lisa Wogan

… one of those hash brown thingies that looked like a baked buffalo tongue.

—Stephen King

"Does he seem right to you?" Carl said. "Because to me he looks unhinged. And this business about the garage-door thingy? How does that make any sense?"

—Richard Russo

Examples of thingy in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

UFOs are unencumbered by that whole space-and-time thingy. —Mike Postalakis, SPIN, 9 Dec. 2024

Feel free to steal the audio for a trendy tik tok thingy. —Hannah Sacks, Peoplemag, 22 July 2024

Interpretation is interwoven with the sheer, thingy strangeness of the object, and can’t be ripped out. —Jackson Arn, The New Yorker, 22 Mar. 2024

Then there are some—many of them regular readers and commenters on this site—who could not only care less about the latest white plastic IoT thingy, but actively avoid such things. —Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica, 12 July 2023

So with nothing to go on but instinct, Mom ended up sending us a beautiful, handmade, heirloom-quality [thingy]. —Carolyn Hax, Washington Post, 27 Dec. 2023

Musk was focused on his own inventions, the self-driving car and humanoid robot thingy which still appears to be mostly robot, Musk has gotten sidetracked in the last year by Twitter, a $44 billion gift to himself. —Chloe Berger, Fortune, 17 May 2023

Rarely do goaltenders get appropriate/due consideration for the Hart — after all, there’s that shiny Vezina thingy to assuage hurt feelings and, of greater consequence in today’s game, there is the long, dominant shadow of Oiler superstar Connor McDavid. —Kevin Paul Dupont, BostonGlobe.com, 11 Mar. 2023

This folding card table thingy is a $1.7 billion solution. —Kyle Whitmire | , al, 15 Mar. 2023

Word History

Etymology

thing + -y

First Known Use

1927, in the meaning defined above