Meanings
- USfictionA Dutch-American villager who falls asleep for 20 years and wakes up to a changed world, having missed the American Revolution; (by extension) someone or something stuck in the past.
A Tory Rip Van Winkle waking from decades of sleep to look round that cabinet table now would be aghast.
2022 January 13, Polly Toynbee, “Finally the Tory papers have caught on that Johnson is a liar – what kept them?”, in The Guardian2 more examples
That is, it makes a lot of sense to see Biden’s problems getting his plans across the finish line as being caused by the Rip Van Winkle caucus, Democrats who checked out intellectually a couple of decades ago and haven’t caught up with America as it now is.
2021 September 27, Paul Krugman, “Biden Versus the Rip Van Winkle Caucus”, in The New York Times, →ISSNThe characters do seem Rip Van Winkle-like, as they stumble upon and blink in amazement at very unsurprising things. “Wow! Instagram? Podcasts?” marvels Miranda at some of Carrie’s latest endeavors, as if these were edgy new enterprises.
2022 January 5, Rhonda Garelick, “Middle Age Doesn’t Happen ‘Just Like That’”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
Origin
From The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent by Washington Irving (1819).
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
Rip Van Winkle. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Rip%20Van%20Winkle
“Rip Van Winkle.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Rip%20Van%20Winkle. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Rip Van Winkle,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Rip%20Van%20Winkle.
Source: Rip Van Winkle on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.