Wizard of Oz

The name of a character from the 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, or any of its adaptations, about the journey of Dorothy through the magical Land of Oz in search of a way home.

Wizard of Oz (plural Wizards of Oz)

1. A person, believed to have magical powers because of awe-inspiring displays, but, as ultimately revealed, ordinary.
   • 1999, Raymond Armstrong, Kafka and Pinter Shadow-Boxing: The Struggle between Father and Son, Macmillan Press Ltd, →ISBN, page 163:

     Nevertheless, as a great and terrible being, the Kafkan patriarch is in fact more like the Wizard of Oz than the Lord God of Israel. The dread-inspiring aura with which the father surrounds himself is based not on power and glory, but on bluff and bravado.

   • 2006 October 25, Joe Scarborough, interview with Bill Mahar, Scarborough Country, MSNBC

     I'm not one of these people that say, “Listen, we should bow down to the Wizard of Oz ’cause we don’t know what’s going on behind that curtain.”

   • 2006, Mark Moorstein, The Perfect President, page 3:

     But as I interpret both Honest Abe and P. T. Barnum, the Wizards of Oz of the world have more influence than Congress or the Supreme Court.

   • 2022 December 29, Deepa Fernandes, Shirley Jahad, “35 years of 'Pelosi in the House': Alexandra Pelosi on her mother's historic career in Congress”, in WBUR:

     “Sort of a 'Wizard of Oz,' pull the curtain back and show how the sausage is made,” Alexandra Pelosi says.

2. (engineering, social sciences, usually attributive) A person simulating the operation of a supposed intelligent device, usually in an experiment.
   • 1992, Wayne D. Gray, William E. Hefley, Dianne Murray, “NEIMO, A MULTIMODAL WIZARD OF OZ PLATFORM”, in Proceedings of the 1993 International Workshop on ..., page 204:

     The goal of Neimo is to provide designers with a "Wizard of Oz" environment to observe and evaluate how users interact with multimodal interfaces.

   • 2006, E. K. Brown, Anne Anderson, Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, volume 11, page 769:

     Once a preliminary application design is complete, a wizard-of-oz study can help test and refine the interface.

   • 2007, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software ..., page 119:

     A Wizard of Oz prototype is an incomplete system that a designer can simulate "behind a curtain" (usually by taking the place of a recognizer) while observing the reactions of real end users (see Figure 1).

• Wizard of Oz experiment