armchairnoun/ˈɑː(ɹ)mtʃɛə(ɹ)/

• 1

  A chair with supports for the arms or elbows.

  • There were many wooden chairs for the bulk of his visitors, and two wicker arm-chairs with red cloth cushions for superior people. From the packing-cases had also emerged some Indian clubs,[…]; and all these articles[…]made a scattered and untidy decoration that Mrs. Clough assiduously dusted and greatly cherished.
  • [W]hen he [Pooh] suddenly saw Piglet sitting in his best arm-chair, he could only stand there rubbing his head and wondering whose house he was in.
• 2

  An upholstered chair without armrests intended for the living room

• 3

  A position removed from that which one is

  • Evaluating possible etymologies requires a significant amount of knowledge about the speakers' lived reality […] for instance, the semantic connection between some species of plant and its use in traditional medicine may be fully transparent to a native speaker, but harder to understand from the perspective of a linguist's armchair.

armchairadj/ˈɑː(ɹ)mtʃɛə(ɹ)/

• 1

  Remote from actual involvement (including cases where a person has retired from previously active involvement).

  • armchair travels
  • These days I'm an armchair detective.
• 2

  derogatoryUnqualified or uninformed but yet giving advice, especially on technical issues, such as law, architecture, medicine, military theory, or sports; relating to such advice.

  • He's just an armchair lawyer who thinks he knows a lot about the law because he reads a legal blog.
  • After the game, the armchair quarterbacks talked about what they would have done differently to win.

armchairverb/ˈɑː(ɹ)mtʃɛə(ɹ)/

• 1

  To create based on theory or general knowledge rather than data.

  • Research for program's subject matter is like mining gold. The more raw material we have, the more likely we are going to find gold nuggets. But this step is often overlooked and a program is "armchaired" from the office of the vice-president or vice-president of sales.
  • The very serious question is then raised as to whether reasonable and logical distractors can be "armchaired" or whether the practice of administering a question in open-end format to obtain logical distractors is a better procedure.
• 2

  To theorize based on analysis of data that was gathered previously; to reflect.

  • In past years, we administered this questionnaire and gave the results to the president who sat at a conference table with top management and armchaired some answers.
  • Briefly it may be stated: Operations come first; concepts follow; theory aims at developing concepts, from operations, plus a nomological network for those concepts, which explains the structure of the data obtained through those operations. And this does not exclude the theorist from doing some 'armchairing' in thinking about logically consistent models, their empirical potentialities, their assumptions and their implications; he may, and usually will, venture some possible empirical interpretations of a model, but in doing so he will carefully avoid any substantive (nonformal) pre-operational definition of a concept or construct.