Skip to main content
PlainSpell

noogie

/ˈnʊɡi/noun, verb

noogie is a noun meaning “An act of putting a person in a headlock and rubbing one's knuckles on the other person's head, often a playful gesture of affection when done lightly” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled N-O-O-G-I-E, and it appears about once in every 51 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of noogie is noogies.

What does noogie mean?

noun

  1. 1

    slangAn act of putting a person in a headlock and rubbing one's knuckles on the other person's head, often a playful gesture of affection when done lightly.

    give someone a noogie

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo perform a noogie on.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce noogie?

  • /ˈnʊɡi/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-au-noogie.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of noogie

  • noogies plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • noogy
  • nuggie
  • nuggy
  • nugie
  • noogying participle, present
  • noogied participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is noogie?

Noogie appears about once in every 51 million words in written English, the 222,788th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Noogie in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense knuckle rub on head:

LanguageWords
Portuguesecascudo
Spanishcoscorrón, cocacho, coscacho, cocorronazo, sape

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does noogie come from?

Unknown, possibly from Yiddish נודזשען (nudzhen, “to badger”), or possibly from Hebrew נוגות (nugot, “afflict”) (see Eicha/Lamentations 1:3) or possibly via an alteration of nudge, matching the alteration of wedge to wedgie.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).