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Definition of "swashbuckler" [swash•buc•kler]

  • A flamboyant swordsman or adventurer. (noun)
  • A sword-wielding ruffian or bully. (noun)
  • A dramatic or literary work dealing with a swashbuckler. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "swashbuckler" in a sentence
  • "Hence, the 1560 word swashbuckler, “a swaggering ruffian,” defined now as the 2001 woman with the tough high-fashion attitude."
  • "I think the pleasure I derive from Conrad is largely due to the fact that while he liberates us with a magnificent jerk from the tiresome monotonous sedentary life of ordinary civilised people, he does so without assuming that banal and bullying air of the adventurous swashbuckler, which is so exhausting; without letting his intellectual interests be swamped by these physiological violences and by these wanderings into savage regions."
  • "He has the handsome face of an iconic and populist swashbuckler, which is Guevara the shell, but he also has the ability to carry himself as an aloof theorist of communist revolution, which is Guevara the seed."