''bellicose'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''bellicose'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250714002928-00-⌔

bellicose - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

bellicose (comparative more bellicose, superlative most bellicose)

• Warlike or combative in nature; aggressively hostile.
  • ✤ You don’t have to be so bellicose, and we can work out a peaceful solution.
  • ✤ CHINA sent both bellicose and conciliatory signals yesterday as tension continued in the Taiwan Strait over Chinese military exercises and the deployment of US naval battle groups.¹
  • ✤ The core Ice Age cast—wooly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano), sabertooth tiger Diego (Denis Leary), and sloth Sid (John Leguizamo)—are set adrift, sailing the high seas on a chunk of ice until they collide with a bellicose primate (Peter Dinklage).²
  • ✤ [Greenland’s current Prime Minister Múte] Egede has insisted that Greenland is not for sale and he framed the polling partly as a referendum on Trump’s seemingly bellicose bullying, saying the election was a “fateful choice.”³

Etymology

From Middle English bellicose,⁴ from Latin bellicosus.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA: /ˈbɛlɪkoʊs/, /ˈbɛləkoʊs/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• Hyphenation: bel‧li‧cose

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 1996 March 15, James Pringle, “Peking sends out mixed signals”, in The Times ‎${}^{[1]}$, number 65,528, →ISSN, →OCLC, Overseas News, page 14, column 8: ↩

2. 2012 July 12, Sam Adams, “Ice Age: Continental Drift”, in AV Club: ↩

3. 2025 March 13, Scott Neuman, Willem Marx, “https://www.npr.org/2025/03/13/nx-s1-5325949/greenland-elections-trump-independence”, in NPR: ↩

4. “bellicōse, adj.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, November 2019, retrieved 30 December 2021. ↩

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