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.”

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.

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

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

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

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

Meaning

Noun