Word of the Day

: November 9, 2023

audacious

adjective aw-DAY-shus

What It Means

Audacious is an adjective used to describe people, or things that people make or do, that are confident and daring, or bold and surprising.

// She made the audacious decision to quit her job.

// The band has been making original and creative music for well over ten years, but their latest album is their most audacious to date.

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audacious in Context

“My auntie Carolyn was a teacher at Bunker Hills School in Washington, DC. She was an audacious teacher, and invited the Queen of England to her classroom—and the Queen came, twice. Teachers like that make such a difference.” — Sheryl Lee Ralph, quoted in Ebony, 16 Aug. 2023

Did You Know?

Fortune favors the bold—or, as ancient Romans are known to have said, “audentes Fortuna iuvat.” Audentes here is the present participle of the Latin verb audēre, meaning “to dare,” a word that also led, via several etymological twists and turns through the centuries, to the English adjective audacious. When it first appeared in English in the mid-1500s, audacious meant “intrepidly daring,” a sense we still use today when we apply the word to various feats of derring-do and those who dare to do them. Since then it has developed several additional meanings, including the closely related “recklessly bold” and “marked by originality and verve,” as in “her audacious new album heralds the future of hip-hop.” Of course, with audacity (another audēre descendent) comes risk that fortune, despite the maxim, doesn’t always favor: as fungi foragers know, there are sagacious mushroomers, and audacious mushroomers, but there are no sagacious audacious mushroomers.