as in afraid
having or showing a shameful lack of courage
a chicken-livered newspaper editor who has been afraid to take on the town's powerful business elite
Synonyms & Similar Words
Relevance
Antonyms & Near Antonyms
Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for chicken-livered
Adjective
-
Umpires, afraid of being overturned, or at least, more aware of the new zone and its limitations, have been calling fewer strikes.—
Ian Miller OutKick,
FOXNews.com,
29 Apr. 2026 -
Almost half are personally afraid of losing their job to AI, ranking it among the most acute individual stressors measured in the survey.—
Jessica Guynn,
USA Today,
28 Apr. 2026
Adjective
-
Kristen Wile of Unpretentious Palate kindly offered me a bite of her toothsome barbacoa entree, wrapped in a collard leaf and served with mayocoba (a creamy, yellow-green canary bean) and a red and green salsa duo.—
Heidi Finley,
Charlotte Observer,
28 Apr. 2026
-
Another is bright yellow with a smooth, contrasting black hood around its head.—
Sheryl DeVore,
Chicago Tribune,
28 Apr. 2026
Adjective
-
And yet, locals weren't scared off, blinded perhaps by their love of the game.—
Lee Cowan,
CBS News,
3 May 2026
-
To him, the gathering in New York was a sign of change, that people are curious enough to give it another look, and not too scared of the potential backlash.—
Quanta Magazine,
Quanta Magazine,
29 Apr. 2026
Adjective
-
The woman who found Nado said the feline appeared frightened but was in overall good health, according to the news outlet.—
Gina Kalsi,
PEOPLE,
8 May 2026
-
Those children hadn’t seemed frightened to me, not visibly anyway.—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
1 May 2026
Adjective
-
The move, Lindon said, is careful.—
Sydney Lake,
Fortune,
9 May 2026
-
However, the Vaile Victorian Society, the volunteer group that maintains the house and runs tours, worries that once the house ceases to become a public property, the careful preservation work, which the aged property relies on, will be impossible to maintain.—
Kansas City Star,
Kansas City Star,
8 May 2026
Adjective
-
Some also have lost lawyers, dismayed by the pusillanimous behavior of their leaders.—
Michael Hiltzik,
Los Angeles Times,
28 May 2025
-
The second believed the United States could attain comprehensive security through military-technological means and saw diplomacy as a quixotic or pusillanimous enterprise that dishonored and weakened the country.—
A. Wess Mitchell,
Foreign Affairs,
22 Apr. 2025
Adjective
-
That larger significance is remarkably unheroic and fatalistic.—
Gabriel Winslow-Yost,
Harper's Magazine,
23 Sep. 2024
-
In the world of The Boys, based on the gleefully scabrous 2000s indie comic-book series of the same name by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson, superheroes are real, pop-culture-dominating, and with rare exceptions, entirely unheroic.—
Brian Hiatt,
Rolling Stone,
13 June 2024
Adjective
-
The joke is on the cowardly villagers, and on Hoja himself, all of whom now have to live in a village terrorized by two war elephants instead of one.—
Perin Gürel,
The Conversation,
22 Apr. 2026
-
Your writing is disgusting and your lack of confronting this team front office head on is an enormous act of cowardly proportions.—
Ira Winderman,
Sun Sentinel,
19 Apr. 2026
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to
show current usage.
Read More
Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Send us feedback.
Cite this Entry
“Chicken-livered.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/chicken-livered. Accessed 11 May. 2026.
Copy CitationLove words? Need even more definitions?
Merriam-Webster unabridged
