as in brownnoser
a person who flatters another in order to get ahead
a transparent apple-polisher whose fulsome praise fooled no one
Synonyms & Similar Words
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Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for apple-polisher
Noun
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Small medieval villages are demolished in the wake of hell’s minions pouring forth from their dimension and into the next.—
Kazuma Hashimoto,
Rolling Stone,
31 Mar. 2025 -
At just 17 years old, Amanda Seyfried booked her breakout role in Mean Girls as Regina George’s bimbo minion who could predict the weather with her boobs.—
airmail.news,
airmail.news,
15 Mar. 2025
Noun
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Thanks to modern medicine, people in the United States rarely deal with parasites.—
Breanne Hayes Haney,
The Conversation,
14 Apr. 2025
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This LifeStraw, 20 percent off for a pack of two, is proven to filter out 99.9 percent of waterborne bacteria and parasites.—
Olivia Young,
Travel + Leisure,
10 Apr. 2025
Noun
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Five months later, PenaVega shared the devastating news with her fans and followers.—
Ryan Brennan,
Miami Herald,
14 Apr. 2025
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Many fans left comments pointing out just how fierce the diva looked.—
Caché McClay,
USA Today,
14 Apr. 2025
Noun
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As of this writing, tens of thousands of Americans in government roles have already been fired by Elon’s tech toadies.—
Kara Swisher,
The Atlantic,
9 Mar. 2025
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But at the end of the Cold War, state sponsors and their toadies lost ground.—
Audrey Kurth Cronin,
Foreign Affairs,
21 Dec. 2011
Noun
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Never submerge in water to wash them because mushrooms absorb like a sponge and become mushy.—
Cathy Thomas,
Oc Register,
14 Apr. 2025
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In water as much as 4,200 feet deep the team from the Schmidt Ocean Institute found a surprisingly flourishing ecosystem that included icefish, giant sea spiders, octopus, corals and sponges.—
Elizabeth Weise,
USA Today,
13 Apr. 2025
Noun
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Republican lickspittles like Lindsey Graham and Jim Banks praised Trump and trashed Zelenskyy while Russian leaders rejoiced.—
Maureen Dowd,
The Mercury News,
4 Mar. 2025
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Of course, being a junior senator and attaching your name to legislation that has little chance of being enacted—none of those have bills passed—is very different from being Vice-President and chief lickspittle to Trump.—
John Cassidy,
The New Yorker,
22 July 2024
Noun
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This is the grim lesson—one that the ambitious sycophants who attach themselves to power have always been slow to learn—of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy, a series of fat, dense novels that filter the reign of Henry VIII through the rise and fall of his Machiavellian advisor, Thomas Cromwell.—
Judy Berman,
Time,
28 Mar. 2025
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Heslov said that Clooney has made sure to keep his old friends close, so he isn’t surrounded by sycophants.—
Thea Traff,
New York Times,
20 Feb. 2025
Noun
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At Princeton, for example, the first nine presidents owned slaves.—
Jonathan Zimmerman,
New York Daily News,
14 Apr. 2025
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In fact, there were a number of indications that the flies, while largely driven by stereotypical responses to specific stimuli, weren't entirely slaves to instinct.—
John Timmer,
ArsTechnica,
9 Apr. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Apple-polisher.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/apple-polisher. Accessed 22 Apr. 2025.
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