Primary
''truculence'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250714001141-00-⌔
truculence - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Noun
truculence (usually uncountable, plural truculences)
- The state of being truculent; eagerness to fight; ferocity.
- ✤ To these provincial autocrats, before whom the peaceable population of all classes had been accustomed to tremble, the reserve of that English-looking engineer caused an uneasiness which swung to and fro between cringing and truculence.1
- ✤ He was huge in all that he did, and his benevolence was even more overpowering than his truculence.2
- ✤ Dundy’s fists were clenched in front of his body and his feet were planted firm and a little apart on the floor, but the truculence in his face was modified by thin rims of white showing between green irises and upper eyelids.3
- ✤ Trump’s truculence on the world stage: “Everyone kowtows to Iran because they’re crazy. Now we have our own bit of crazy.”4
Etymology
From French truculence, from Latin truculentia.
Pronunciation
- (General American) IPA: /ˈtrʌk.jə.ləns/
- Audio (General American): 🔊
Printed 2026-06-28.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original Footnotes
1904 January 29 – October 7, Joseph Conrad, chapter 7, in Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, London; New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers […], published 1904, →OCLC: ↩
1929, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Disintegration Machine : ↩
1930, Dashiell Hammet, chapter 8, in The Maltese Falcon, New York, N.Y.; London: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →OCLC, page 97: ↩
2020, Bret Stephens, “Meet a Secret Trump Voter”, in New York Times : ↩
Secondary
• • •