English

Proper noun

Sherlock Holmes

1. A series of novels by Arthur Conan Doyle about a male consulting detective with keen observational awareness, astute logical reasoning and professional forensic skills; also related media based on the books, such as movies.
2. The fictional detective who is the protagonist of the series.
   • 1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, “chapter V & XX, XII”, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, OCLC 1227855:

     “Oh, hullo, Mrs Cream.” The woman she was addressing was tall and thin with a hawk-like face that reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. She had an ink spot on her nose, the result of working on her novel of suspense. [...] This was the first time I had seen Ma Cream today, she having gone off around noon to lunch with some friends in Birmingham, and I would willingly not have seen her now, for something in her manner seemed to suggest that she spelled trouble. She was looking more like Sherlock Holmes than ever. Slap a dressing-gown on her and give her a violin, and she could have walked straight into Baker Street and no questions asked. [...] She sniffed. And if I were to say that I liked the way she sniffed, I would be wilfully deceiving my public. It was the sort of sniff Sherlock Holmes would have sniffed when about to clap the darbies on the chap who had swiped the Maharajah's ruby.
     [...]
     “Yes, sir, if that was the language of love, I'll eat my hat,” said the blood relation, alluding, I took it, to the beastly straw contraption in which she does her gardening, concerning which I can only say that it is almost as foul as Uncle Tom's Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, which has frightened more crows than any other lid in Worcestershire.

3. (figuratively, by extension) Any person who has or is considered to have great powers of observation and deduction.

Synonyms

• (person with great powers of deduction): Sherlock, Holmes

Derived terms

• Sherlock Holmesish
• Sherlock Holmesy

Translations

See also

• Concordance:Sherlock Holmes