brawl
/brɔːl
/noun
A rough or noisy fight or quarrel: he’d got into a drunken brawl in a bar a street brawl...
- As a nurse, she had seen victims of bar fights and street brawls, but these wounds were some of the worst she had seen.
- It's much too barbaric and such things are left to bar fights and street brawls.
- There was peace at last and only the infrequent traffic in Wilde Street and a drunken brawl or two outside disturbed the peace of our new home.
Synonyms
fight, fist fight, skirmish, scuffle, tussle, fracas, scrimmage, fray, melee, rumpus, altercation, wrangle, clash, free-for-all, scrum, brouhaha, commotion, uproar;
fisticuffs, rough and tumble;
Irish, North American, & Australian donnybrook
Law, dated affray
informal scrap, dust-up, set-to, shindy
British informal punch-up, bust-up, ruck, bit of argy-bargy
British informal, Football afters
Scottish informal rammy, swedge, square go
North American informal roughhouse, brannigan
Australian/New Zealand informal stoush
rare broil, bagarre
verb [no object]
1Fight or quarrel in a rough or noisy way: he ended up brawling with a lout outside his house...
- But how can our economy get better if we are always engaged in fighting and brawling with each other?
- The family of a 35-year-old man, who died after brawling with another man outside his home, said they have been left with more questions than answers after a Bolton coroner recorded an open verdict.
- Yet again, while trying to appeal to the world's most sophisticated market, the impression is of Scots doing what we do best - squabbling and brawling with each other while shocked onlookers avert their gaze.
Synonyms
fight, skirmish, scuffle, tussle, exchange blows, come to blows, struggle, grapple, wrestle, scrimmage
informal scrap, have a dust-up, have a set-to
British informal have a punch-up
Scottish informal swedge
North American informal rough-house
Australian/New Zealand informal stoush, go the knuckle
1.1 literary (Of a stream) flow noisily.Winter might have frozen them for now, but in warmer weather dozens of brawling mountain streams ran down to the northernmost tributaries of the Greenleaf River....
- It would have been utterly ridiculous to eschew the opportunity to double-handed fly-fish the huge and brawling salmon rivers of Swedish Lapland, just for want of the necessary skills.
- She comforted herself at first with the thought that with the brawling, deafening stream between them, there would be no chance for embarrassing conversation.
Derivatives
brawler
/ noun ...- Its roots go back to Tough Guy competitions, in which a town's toughest barroom brawlers were pitted against each other for prize money.
- I'd never seen him fight, but I knew he was a pub brawler, and here he stood before us, barefooted, ready to have a go.
- The mother gets through a bottle of vodka a day and yet my friend cannot afford to go back to court, nor can he get legal aid, so he is left watching his innocents bruise as they grow into potential alcoholic brawlers.
Origin
Late Middle English: perhaps ultimately imitative and related to bray1.