bellicose
/ˈbɛlɪkəʊs
/adjective
Demonstrating aggression and willingness to fight: a mood of bellicose jingoism...
- Yet it is also a fact that the Administration has quietly backed down from a number of its most bellicose threats.
- The fans also have their say and again the attitudes are conversational rather than bellicose and confrontational.
- At the end of the 19th century, people were full of hope and expectations of a more peaceful, more contented, less bellicose world.
Synonyms
belligerent, aggressive, hostile, threatening, antagonistic, pugnacious, truculent, confrontational, argumentative, quarrelsome, disputatious, contentious, militant, combative;
quick-tempered, hot-tempered, ill-tempered, bad-tempered, irascible, captious
informal spoiling for a fight
British informal stroppy, bolshie
North American informal scrappy
rare oppugnant
Derivatives
bellicosity
/ noun ...- So far, all the running for a ‘regime change’, as it is delicately known, has come from the president and his main security advisers, but for all their bellicosity they cannot declare war unilaterally.
- It seems like we're all taken with wealth and bellicosity on some fundamental level.
- And we in turn have resorted to bellicosity at a level that may or may not be justified.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin bellicosus, from bellicus 'warlike', from bellum 'war'.
rebel from Middle English:
The Latin word rebellis was originally used in reference to someone making a fresh declaration of war after being defeated. The root was bellum ‘war’, as in bellicose (Late Middle English) or ‘warlike’, combined with re- ‘again’. A person who is deeply dissatisfied by society in general but does not have a specific aim to fight for might be described as a rebel without a cause. The first such person was James Dean, star of the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. Revel (Late Middle English) comes from the French equivalent, which developed the sense ‘to make a noise’ from the basic sense ‘to rise in rebellion’.