toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

pugnacious
in a sentence

show 44 more with this conextual meaning
  • Adams-a small, Pugnacious Texan who'd gotten rich selling bonds during the boomIng 1980s-is an experienced airplane pilot who'd spent many hours gazing down on the tops of clouds; later he told me that he recognized these innocent-looking puffs of water vapor to be the crowns of robust thunderheads immediately after reaching the top.†   (source)
  • He drove fast, pugnaciously, darting into empty spaces, nudging other cars out of their lanes.†   (source)
  • Smith, a man at once pugnacious, profane, and professorial, proposed that the business of mounting continental land offensives was the historic province of the Army, and should remain so.†   (source)
  • 'How should I know?' answered Chief White Halfoat, staggering inside the tent just then with a bottle of whiskey cradled in his arm and sitting himself down pugnaciously between the two of them.†   (source)
  • She was a big, pugnacious woman with a wicked sense of humor and a voice like a rusty car muffler.†   (source)
  • "An evil day to receive a beautiful woman," The Admiral said, his voice surprisingly mild and mannered to issue from such a pugnacious face.†   (source)
  • One place, however, I vividly recall—a grassy peninsula, usually unpeopled at that hour on weekdays, jutting out into the lake where a sextet of large, rather pugnacious-looking swans coasted like gangsters through the reeds, interrupting their swim long enough to waddle up onto the grass and scrounge competitively, with aggressive hiss-lags from their voiceless throats, for the crusts of our poppyseed rolls or other leftovers.†   (source)
  • For a second Jamie reacts pugnaciously and half rises from his chair to do battle, but suddenly he seems to sober up to a shocked realization of what he has said and he sinks back limply.†   (source)
  • He turned with surprise to face a stout, pugnacious colonel with a large head and mustache and a smooth, florid skin.†   (source)
  • Short, pugnacious, a Kentuckian by birth, Green began by pointing out to the court that Kansas' law, in regard to sanity, adheres to the M'Naghten Rule, the ancient British importation which contends that if the accused knew the nature of his act, and knew it was wrong, then he is mentally competent and responsible for his actions.†   (source)
  • The pugnacious Colonel Johnson, wearing his trademark soft cap with the visor flipped up, called for two four-man patrols to reconnoiter routes up the northern face of Suribachi.†   (source)
  • 'I can get killed flying them, too,' Dobbs answered pugnaciously in his rough, quavering, overwrought voice.†   (source)
  • One of the sitting men cursed pugnaciously and hurled a wine bottle at Yossarian when he turned to look up.†   (source)
  • At the sight of David backing away, Yussie doubled his fists and screwed up his face pugnaciously.†   (source)
  • In Hope the effect is apparent only in a bristling, touchy, pugnacious attitude.†   (source)
  • 'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously.†   (source)
  • I'll criticise him if I like," she said pugnaciously.†   (source)
  • That's what I said," Number 3 answered pugnaciously.†   (source)
  • She would wag her powerful head from side to side, pugnaciously emphatic.†   (source)
  • "What do you mean you look funny?" said Ben pugnaciously.†   (source)
  • They were of various sizes and ages, but they were all stamped with the print of haggling determination and a pugnacious closure of the mouth.†   (source)
  • I rise; "Fight," I cry, "fight!" remembering the shape of my own nose, and strike with this spoon upon this table pugnaciously.'†   (source)
  • The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grapefruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt.†   (source)
  • Hope goes on pugnaciously.†   (source)
  • His face was courteously pugnacious, fierce, with large yellow bulging eyeballs, and several bulldog pleatings around the mouth.†   (source)
  • You have a restless, pugnacious, rebellious disposition.†   (source)
  • He told Hamidullah to cheer up, all would end well; and Ham idullah did cheer up, and became pugnacious and sensible.†   (source)
  • At all events, of these thousands of mutineers were some of the tars who not so very long afterwards—whether wholly prompted thereto by patriotism, or pugnacious instinct, or by both,—helped to win a coronet for Nelson at the Nile, and the naval crown of crowns for him at Trafalgar.†   (source)
  • There was a better hand across the table, held by a pugnacious Irish youth, who was a political hanger-on of the Tammany district in which they were located.†   (source)
  • He put his hand in his pocket, failed to find what he wanted, and rushing past me went blundering noisily and pugnaciously downstairs.†   (source)
  • These animals without courage, these fear-haunted, pain-driven things, without a spark of pugnacious energy to face torment,—they are no good for man-making.†   (source)
  • As he made the demand he spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth and shoved his pugnacious face close to Oofty-Oofty.†   (source)
  • He was a powerfully-built man, as I have said, with a fine forehead and rather heavy features; but his eyes had that odd drooping of the skin above the lids which often comes with advancing years, and the fall of his heavy mouth at the corners gave him an expression of pugnacious resolution.†   (source)
  • A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.†   (source)
  • "Gore's no fool; you needn't tell me that," he observed presently, in a pugnacious tone, as if poor Gritty had been urging that lawyer's capabilities; "but, you see, he isn't up to the law as Wakem is.†   (source)
  • For while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.†   (source)
  • Fortunately, however, Mr Pyke confined himself to mere verbal smifligation, and they reached their box with no more serious interruption by the way, than a desire on the part of the same pugnacious gentleman to 'smash' the assistant box-keeper for happening to mistake the number.†   (source)
  • It is ended by my own pugnacity.†   (source)
  • Sometimes he squired her clumsily through the town, to the movies, and later, with the uneasy pugnacity of youth, past the loafing cluster at Wood's.†   (source)
  • [secretly daunted, but rising from his knees with an air of reckless pugnacity] I ain't afraid of you.†   (source)
  • Very much indeed of what we call moral education, he said, is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.†   (source)
  • Thus Mr Snevellicci had no sooner swallowed another glassful than he smiled upon all present in happy forgetfulness of having exhibited symptoms of pugnacity, and proposed 'The ladies!†   (source)
  • Their state of mind, vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and [Pg064] pugnacious, has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on "Colonialism in America.†   (source)
  • …as a backtothelander, which was one reason he strongly resented the innuendo put upon him in so barefaced a fashion by our friend at the gathering of the clans in Barney Kiernan's so that he, though often considerably misunderstood and the least pugnacious of mortals, be it repeated, departed from his customary habit to give him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard though, so far as politics themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties invariably resulting from…†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)