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''cavalier'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260124202223-00-⌔

cavalier - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

cavalier (comparative more cavalier, superlative most cavalier)

  • Lacking the proper care or concern for something important, reckless, rash, high-handed.
    • ✤ Synonyms: dismissive, offhand, nonchalant
    • ✤ Antonyms: respectful, earnest, attentive
    • ✤ But, on the following day, no sign of Poirot. I was getting angry. He was really treating us in the most cavalier fashion.1
    • ✤ Such a cavalier attitude might seem to suggest that doctors consider the uterus as dispensable an organ as, say, an appendix—and some feminists have accused the medical profession of just such callousness […]2
    • ✤ For another example, see Palumbo, Rudd, and Whelan (2006), who found that several empirical consumption papers from the 1980s and 1990s took a cavalier approach to deflation and measurement that unfortunately affected their results.3
  • High-spirited.
  • Supercilious.
    • ✤ Synonyms: haughty, disdainful, curt, brusque
  • (obsolete) Free and easy; unconcerned with formalities
    • ✤ Antonym: stiff
    • ✤ Leporello (a surname that proved the antechamber not to be wholly illiterate), far from resembling Don Juan’s trembling valet, was a handsome young man, with an animated face, nimble in gait, and of cavalier manners; wearing elegantly enough the clothes which had, doubtless, appertained to his master; and evidently quite the pet of the ladies present, and paying assiduous court to Mademoiselle Astarté, the queen of the party.4
  • (historical) Of or pertaining to the party of King Charles I of England (1600–1649).

Noun

cavalier (plural cavaliers)

  • (historical) A military man serving on horse, (chiefly) early modern cavalry officers who had abandoned the heavy armor of medieval knights.
    • ✤ Synonym: chevalier
    • ✤ Hypernym: horseman
    • ✤ Coordinate term: cavalryman
  • (historical) A gallant: a sprightly young dashing military man.
  • A gentleman of the class of such officers, particularly:
    • (historical) A courtesan or noble under Charles I of England, particularly a royalist partisan during the English Civil War which ended his reign.
      • ✤ Antonym: Roundhead
  • (slang) Someone with an uncircumcised penis.
    • ✤ Antonym: roundhead
    • ✤ The roundheads in the school showers easily equalled the cavaliers.5
    • ✤ Since penile preference is so tied up with personal aesthetics and body image, it seems both logical and fair to leave the choice of cavalier or roundhead to the owner of the organ, thus avoiding the sort of life-long pain expressed in a comment like this: […]6
    • ✤ I knew about the English Civil War, Cavaliers (wrong but romantic) versus Roundheads (right but repulsive), but I didn’t think that was what he was talking about. I shook my head. “It means our willies aren’t circumcised,” he explained. “Are you a cavalier or a roundhead?”7
  • (architecture) A defensive work rising from a bastion, etc., and overlooking the surrounding area.

Verb

cavalier (third-person singular simple present cavaliers, present participle cavaliering, simple past and past participle cavaliered)

  • (transitive, dated) Of a man: to act in a gallant and dashing manner toward (women).
    • ✤ His social and kind nature is inferred from his cavaliering the ladies Percy and Mortimer, and introducing them, before their husbands depart for the war.8
    • ✤ “I thought,” Graeme burred at him, transfixing him with shrewd eyes, “that you were cavaliering the Italian girl, Beatrice Cenci or Vittoria Colonna or whatever her name is?”9

Etymology

First appears c. 1562 in a translation by Peter Whitehorne. Borrowed from Middle French cavalier (“horseman”),10 itself borrowed from Old Italian cavaliere (“mounted soldier, knight”),11 borrowed from Old Occitan cavalier, from Late Latin caballārius (“horseman”), from Latin caballus (“horse”), probably from Gaulish caballos ‘nag’, variant of cabillos (compare Welsh ceffyl, Breton kefel, Irish capall), akin to German (Swabish) Kōb ‘nag’ and Old Church Slavonic кобꙑла (kobyla) ‘mare’. Previous English forms include cavalero and cavaliero. Doublet of caballero and chevalier.

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ˌkævəˈlɪɚ/
  • (US) IPA: /ˈkæ.vəˌlir/
  • Audio (Australian): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɪə(ɹ)
  • Hyphenation: cav‧a‧lier

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1920, Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, London: Pan Books, published 1954, page 144: ↩

  2. 2012, Barbara Seaman, Laura Eldridge, Voices of the Women’s Health Movement (volume 1): ↩

  3. 2024, Jeremy B. Rudd, A Practical Guide to Macroeconomics, page 60: ↩

  4. 1846, Marie Joseph Eugène Sue, Martin the foundling; or, The memoirs of a valet de chambre, Harper, page 323: ↩

  5. 1992, John Hoyland, Fathers and Sons, page 94: ↩

  6. 2008, “Objections of a sentimental character: The subjective dimension of foreskin loss”, in Matatu, number 37, →OCLC, page 158: ↩

  7. 2013, Ellen Datlow, Hauntings, →ISBN, page 155: ↩

  8. 1863, Charles Cowden Clarke, Shakespeare-characters; Chiefly Those Subordinate, page 427: ↩

  9. 1916, Good Housekeeping, volume 64, page 113: ↩

  10. “cavalier”, in Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present. ↩

  11. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “cavalier”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩

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