Primary
''taciturn'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260320113731-00-⌔
taciturn - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Adjective
taciturn (comparative more taciturn, superlative most taciturn)
- Silent; temperamentally untalkative; disinclined to speak.
- ✤ Synonyms: reticent, untalkative; see also Thesaurus: taciturn
- ✤ Antonyms: garrulous, loquacious
- ✤ The two sisters could hardly have been more different, one so boisterous and expressive, the other so taciturn and calm.
- ✤ We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.1
- ✤ We spent a lot of time up on the staging of the great furnaces, trying to pick up the tricks of the trade from the taciturn furnacemen who sat around placidly smoking, or chewing twist, and occasionally throwing in more pig iron to the molten white-hot metal.2
- ✤ To say that Cavendish’s distaste for hype and self-promotion extended to his personal life would be an understatement. The statesman Lord Henry Brougham observed in 1845 that his taciturn colleague “uttered fewer words in the course of his life than any man who lived to fourscore years, not at all excepting the monks of La Trappe.”3
Etymology
Back-formation from taciturnity, from Middle English taciturnite, from Latin taciturnitās; or alternatively from French taciturne, likely reinforced by Latin taciturnus, from tacitus (“secret, tacit”).
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈtæsɪtɜːn/
- (US) IPA: /ˈtæsɪtɝn/
- Audio (US): 🔊
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
1813, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 18: ↩
1945 January and February, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—III”, in Railway Magazine, page 14: ↩
2015, Steve Silberman, chapter 1, in Megan Newman, editor, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, New York: Avery, →ISBN, page 24: ↩
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