pugnacious means naturally aggressive or hostile; combative; belligerent; bellicose. It carries an Arena rating of 1787, earned across 39 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, pugnacious ranks #224 of 42,752 for Qualifying, #692 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #952 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #1,111 of 17,126 for Most Satisfying to Say.
pugnacious is pronounced /pʌɡˈneɪ.ʃəs/.
Why “pugnacious” is a great word
Having a quarrelsome or combative nature; inclined to fight. From the stem of Latin pugnāx ("combative") + -ous, from pugnō ("to fight"), from pugnus ("fist"). First recorded in English 1635–45. Unlike bellicose, which surveys battlefields and nations, or contentious, which thrives on argument and dispute, pugnacious is personal, bodily, immediate. It is the bantamweight at the bar who squares up at a spilled drink, the neighbor whose fence disputes end with bloody knuckles, the small dog that snarls at dogs three times its size with no conception of losing. The word lands like a shove to the chest, a reminder of how thin the skin of civility can be.
Etymology
From the stem of Latin pugnāx + -ous, from pugnō (“to fight”), from pugnus (“fist”). By surface analysis, Latin pugn- + -acious.
adj
- Naturally aggressive or hostile; combative; belligerent; bellicose.e.g.“Not that the doctor was a bully, or even pugnacious, in the usual sense of the word; he had no disposition to provoke a fight, no propense love of quarrelling.” — 1858, Anthony Trollope, chapter 3, in Doctor Thorne. […], volume I, London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC, page 53:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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