audacious
adjective
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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.
Examples of audacious in a Sentence
Valerie Sayers, Commonweal, 13 July 2007
This is an audacious claim, and Kramer anticipates, even encourages, the controversy it might provoke.
—Gary Greenberg, Harper's, August 2005
… Morgan Pressel, the top-ranked female amateur in the country, has charted a less audacious course. A 17-year-old scrapper who gained prominence by tying for second at the U.S. Women's Open in June, Pressel is satisfied with taking on and whipping her own kind.
—E. M. Swift, Sports Illustrated, 8 Aug. 2005
… he owns and operates a seductively spacious jazz club. But that's his day job, his cover. He executes his audacious midnight burglaries outside of the city, working solo, mapping out every detail so that nothing can go wrong, then returning like a phantom.
—Owen Gliberman, Entertainment Weekly, 20 July 2001
They have audacious plans for the new school.
This is her most audacious film so far.
She made an audacious decision to quit her job.
Max Goldbart, Deadline, 8 Jan. 2026
Glatzer’s upcoming eight-episode series, The Audacity, is a darkly comic drama about ambition in the tech bubble, centered on a rich cast of characters led by Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen)—an audacious data-mining CEO who will stop at nothing to amass profit and power.
—Rebecca Ford, Vanity Fair, 7 Jan. 2026
But experts worry this audacious undertaking risks fraying the last remaining threads of international norms, emboldening autocracies into new acts of aggression without fear of consequences.
—Charlie Campbell, Time, 5 Jan. 2026
And now this capture of Nicolas Maduro, when our vital national interests are implicated, the President takes bold, audacious direct action.
—CBS News, 4 Jan. 2026
See All Example Sentences for audacious
Cite this Entry
“Audacious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/audacious. Accessed 12 Jan. 2026.
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audacious
adjective
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