cornballs

noun

plural of cornball
as in clowns
an awkward or simple person especially from a small town or the country a movie about a cornball making his way through a world of cynical sophisticates

Synonyms & Similar Words

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms

Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of cornballs Cloudy with a chance of cornballs. — Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune, 26 June 2026
Recent Examples of Synonyms for cornballs
  1. clowns
  2. hicks
  3. peasants
  4. bumpkins
  5. rubes
  6. yokels
  7. hayseed
  8. provincials
Noun
  • Many Orlando-area homes feature skeletons that tower over the neighborhood, witchy covens, horror movie icons, clowns, pirate ships, pumpkins, zombies and vampires.
    — Patrick Connolly, The Orlando Sentinel, 22 Oct. 2026
  • Friday, Edith, and the maintenance bots are sometimes goofy comic-relief clowns.
    — Tasha Robinson, Vulture, 21 Oct. 2026
Definition of clowns
Noun
  • So a bunch of hicks from Topeka were left up to our own devices of going down to Robert Hall and finding something that might be kind of cool.
    — Devon Ivie, Vulture, 8 Apr. 2026
Definition of hicks
Noun
  • Happy peasants, miserable millionaires Graham first spotted the pattern in China.
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 24 Oct. 2026
  • After all, from 1773 to 1775, more than thirty-five thousand agriculturalist peasants made war against Russia, in what is commonly referred to as Pugachev’s Rebellion, after the name of its leader.
    — Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 19 Oct. 2026
Definition of peasants
Noun
  • Simply put, the small-town bumpkins from North Florida who support this idea should be made to pay for it.
    — Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Sun Sentinel, 18 Feb. 2026
Definition of bumpkins
Noun
  • That’s just the nature of talking about AI these days, when even the most passionate AI champions don’t quite know what the technology might do, and the rest of us rubes are left to try to make sense of it.
    — Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 15 Oct. 2026
  • The good news is that this future of an AI takeover is looking increasingly unlikely, at least at the industry’s current pace, a fact which is now dawning on some of the biggest rubes and dupes in the corporate world.
    — Joe Wilkins, Futurism, 8 July 2026
Definition of rubes
Noun
  • It was left to the feds in Boston to arrest Farwell, after Meatball’s local yokels adamantly refused to do anything other than try to broom the crime by one of their own.
    — Howie Carr, Boston Herald, 26 Apr. 2026
Definition of yokels
Noun
  • Duke Slater, pal of Jim Nabors’ hayseed Gomer Pyle on the ’60s sitcom of that name, died of natural causes today at UCLA Hospital in Los Angeles.
    — Greg Evans, Deadline, 12 June 2026
  • Baby Billy’s first full-frontal scene is more a testament to Walton Goggins’s incredible hayseed bravado in the rule.
    — Scott Tobias, Vulture, 31 Mar. 2025
Definition of hayseed
Noun
  • Marlowe, the son of a poor Canterbury cobbler, and Shakespeare, the son of a Stratford glover and alderman, were both unlikely artistic geniuses, provincials in a nation in which social class was rigidly fixed.
    — Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor, 10 Sep. 2025
Definition of provincials

Browse Nearby Words

cornball
cornballs
corner
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Cite this Entry

“Cornballs.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cornballs. Accessed 27 Oct. 2026.

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