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Definition of audacious
1a : intrepidly daring : adventurous an audacious mountain climberb : recklessly bold : rash an audacious maneuver
2 : contemptuous of law, religion, or decorum : insolent an audacious maverick
3 : marked by originality and verve audacious experiments
audaciously
adverbaudaciousness
nounExplore Merriam-Webster
audacious was our Word of the Day on 01/14/2009. Hear the podcast!
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Examples of audacious in a Sentence
Whatever made him think his audacious fiction would sell—especially after a lifetime of literary marginalization—is a mystery, but he has certainly been vindicated. With a rush of work that he did not begin publishing until he was in his forties, he won literary fame in Europe and Latin America. —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.
Recent Examples of audacious from the Web
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The contemporary shows include some some flat-out audacious items, such as Alex Ulichny’s spiky red coat made of Zip Ties and Arnold’s gorgeously gritty blink-of-the eye images.
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Mohammed bin Salman will soon inherit one of the world's toughest jobs, one in which only an arrogant, ambitious man with an audacious plan is likely to succeed.
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As [Trump] disrupts alliances across the map, nearly every level of government in Canada has taken on new duties in a quietly audacious campaign to cajole, contain and if necessary coerce the Americans.
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But this nonsensical spectacle — which features what look like dancing sperm cells — is also a funny and audacious metaphor: In the gene pool of ideas, some may well prove fertile.
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The award-winning play, about an audacious adolescent girls soccer team, had a successful off-Broadway run in late 2016 and has been done at a lot of regional theaters this year.
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Few would have noticed an audacious gambit like that amid the gravity of the Comey hearing.
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Macron's most audacious intervention yet came on Thursday night, in a remarkable video address to the American people responding to Trump's withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accord that quickly went viral.
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For all the play’s looky-looky theatricality and audacious language, Parks’s ultimate goal is to afford Baartman her own dignity and desires, to plumb the heart and the mind inside that body.
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'audacious'. Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Did You Know?
Shakespeare used "audacious" seven times in his plays. That in itself wasn't exactly an act of bold originality. The word, which comes from the Latin root audac- ("bold"), had been around for decades. But the Bard was the first to use "audacious" in its "insolent" sense ("Obey, audacious traitor; kneel for grace," Henry VI Part 2), and he may have been the first to use the adverb "audaciously." "Audacious" itself was something of an innovation in the 16th century: it was one of the earliest "-acious" words in English. Subsequently, we've added lots of "-acious" adjectives to our lexicon, including "pugnacious," "loquacious," "voracious," and even, in the 19th century, "bodacious" (which is most likely a combination of "bold" and "audacious").
Origin and Etymology of audacious
Middle French audacieux, from audace boldness, from Latin audacia, from audac-, audax bold, from audēre to dare, from avidus eager — more at avid
AUDACIOUS Defined for English Language Learners
audacious
playDefinition of audacious for English Language Learners
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: very confident and daring : very bold and surprising or shocking
AUDACIOUS Defined for Kids
Learn More about audacious
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See words that rhyme with audacious Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for audacious Spanish Central: Translation of audacious Nglish: Translation of audacious for Spanish speakers Britannica English: Translation of audacious for Arabic speakers
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