obstreperous
adjective
Did you know?
Imagine walking a dog down a sidewalk in a neighborhood full of delicious smells and other temptations—it’s easy to picture your pooch barking and straining at the leash to chase a squirrel, or dragging you toward something enticingly (to them) stinky, right? But can you imagine saying to your doggo in response, “Quit being so obstreperous!” Probably not. Obstreperous has a much more formal flair than words, such as stubborn or unruly, used to describe similar behavior. As such it’s unlikely to be used in casual speech or contexts like the one above. The word comes from a combination of the handy Latin prefix ob- (meaning “against”) and strepere, a verb meaning “to make a noise”; someone who is obstreperous can be thought of as literally making noise to rebel against something, much like a protesting crowd or an unruly child. Strepere has made little noise in the English lexicon, however; in addition to obstreperous it seems only to have contributed to the rarely encountered strepitous and its synonym strepitant, which mean “characterized or accompanied by much noise”—that is, “noisy.”
Examples of obstreperous in a Sentence
Josh Hammer, MSNBC Newsweek, 3 Dec. 2025
All at once, Vance had made an obstreperous return to the center of the national stage—and so did the memes.
—Jessica Winter, The New Yorker, 19 Mar. 2025
In some ways, Paul has been less obstreperous than them.
—Eric Cortellessa, TIME, 18 Mar. 2025
In those days, even small neighborhood theaters employed uniformed ushers to guide latecomers to their seats with a flashlight, patrol the aisles, and handle obstreperous customers.
—Thomas Doherty, The Hollywood Reporter, 27 Dec. 2024
See All Example Sentences for obstreperous
Cite this Entry
“Obstreperous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obstreperous. Accessed 14 Mar. 2026.
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obstreperous
adjective
