hardiment means bravery, courage. It carries an Arena rating of 1523, earned across 47 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, hardiment ranks #2,830 of 17,130 for Most Beautiful Words, #3,106 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #4,832 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #6,400 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words.
hardiment is pronounced /ˈhɑːdɪmənt/.
Why “hardiment” is a great word
HARDIMENT — [Noun] A spirited bravery or courage, particularly of a bold, audacious, or enterprising character. From Middle English, borrowed from Old French hardiment, from hardi ("bold, daring") + the adverbial suffix -ment. Unlike "hardihood," which suggests a stubborn, heedless endurance, or "valor," which is courage polished for the heroic stage of battle, hardiment is the pure, unalloyed quality of being daring. It is the crisp salute before the hopeless charge, the hand extended to dance on an empty floor, or the quiet audacity of planting a garden on the edge of a wasteland—a small and personal defiance of the probable, the quiet architecture of a risk willingly taken.
Etymology
From Old French hardiment, from hardi.
noun
- Bravery, courage.e.g.“But full of fire and greedy hardiment, / The youthfull knight could not for ought be staide […]” — 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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