Adjective
the macho world of football Noun
their annual guys-only hunting trip is a celebration of macho
Recent Examples on the Web
Adjective
In August 1987, Dirty Dancing swept moviegoers off their feet with the upstairs-downstairs romance between an earnest daddy’s girl (Jennifer Grey) and a macho dance instructor (Patrick Swayze) at the fictional Kellerman's resort in the Catskills.—EW.com, 30 Mar. 2024 Vargas rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s, and had a reputation for being macho and drinking hard.—Jillian Eugenios, NBC News, 8 Mar. 2024 Norman Mailer wrote with an unstable mixture of self-indulgence and self-awareness, bravado and diffidence, glibness and bracing honesty, macho posturing and an almost sheepish gentleness.—Andrew Delbanco, The New York Review of Books, 28 Mar. 2024 Sidekick to: Don Quixote de la Mancha Don Quixote may be the star of Miguel de Cervantes' deeply ironic, surprisingly modern satire of macho heroism, but Sancho is the earthy everyman.—Ew Staff Updated, EW.com, 6 Mar. 2024 Part of that Latin identity comes with a very macho culture, a defense mechanism to protect our families.—Kyle Eustice, SPIN, 20 Mar. 2024 Beginning his act while seated in the audience, with a cowboy hat obscuring his impossibly angular features, Gosling was in character as the woebegone Ken, a macho hunk doomed to play beta in the toy netherworld of Barbie.—Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 11 Mar. 2024 Politicians use macho displays to assert dominance and not-so-subtly telegraph nostalgia for the old days.—James Poniewozik, New York Times, 9 Mar. 2024 There were Zoot suits, ranchero plaids and jeans, and track suits of the kind Dominican macho men wear around the city.—Vogue Runway, Vogue, 15 Feb. 2024
Noun
Sometimes a polarizing figure in country music, the 6-foot-4 singer broke out in the country boom years of the 1990s, crafting an identity around his macho, pro-American swagger and writing songs that fans loved to hear.—Naledi Ushe, USA TODAY, 16 Feb. 2024 The British actor plays the lead role of Cash (all the characters have names like that), whose macho bona fides are established in the opening sequence in which he’s shown doing shirtless pull-ups and push-ups, his chiseled musculature clearly earned the hard way.—Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 Feb. 2024 If being a macho who loves gold accessories is suddenly a crime, the entire diaspora is in trouble.—Jp Brammer, Los Angeles Times, 28 Sep. 2023 The reality is that American politics since Trump beat Clinton has taken a turn back to the macho.—Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker, 16 Feb. 2023 The folks at Pontiac realize this is their image leader, and they're not all convinced the T/A can lose its four-speed, big-motor macho all at once and save face with a turbocharger.—Don Sherman, Car and Driver, 1 May 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'macho.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
Etymology
Adjective
Spanish, literally, male, from Latin masculus — more at masculine
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