nodding acquaintance

Definitions

1. 1

   A casual or partial familiarity

   A casual or partial familiarity; a relationship which is not close or fully developed; an inexact understanding (of something).

   • None of the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a nodding acquaintance with them.
   • There isn't any doubt but that he had a nodding acquaintance with every pretty girl in town.
   • [A] Northwestern University psychologist reported, for what it was worth, a surprising finding: an average college-educated modern man has at least a nodding acquaintance with four times as many words as Shakespeare used.
2. 2

   Someone who is a remote or passing acquaintance.

   • [T]o reach Cattewater I must either fetch a circuit through purlieus where every householder knew me and every urchin was a nodding acquaintance, or make a straight dash.
   • He could not treat this scandalous matter in his own office. . . . Who was there he could go to? Linkman and Laver in Budge Row, perhaps—reliable, not too conspicuous, only nodding acquaintances.
   • [S]he knows only two of them as nodding acquaintances, and has never spoken to them privately.

The neighborhood