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ferocious

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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English

Etymology

Taken from Latin ferōx (“wild, bold, savage, fierce”) +‎ -ous.

Pronunciation

Adjective

ferocious (comparative more ferocious, superlative most ferocious)

  1. Marked by extreme and violent energy.
    • 1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 376:
      But it seemed to me that there were few faces like his, with the ferocious profile that brought to mind the Latin word rapax or one of Rouault's crazed death-dealing arbitrary kings.
    • 2011 October 1, Tom Fordyce, “Rugby World Cup 2011: England 16-12 Scotland”, in BBC Sport‎, archived from the original on 9 April 2022:
      Scotland needed a victory by eight points to have a realistic chance of progressing to the knock-out stages, and for long periods of a ferocious contest looked as if they might pull it off.
    • 2023 January 25, Howard Johnston, “Peter Kelly: August 2 1944-December 28 2022”, in RAIL, number 975, page 47:
      "My memory of him in the office at Peterborough was the ferocious nature of his typing, on a manual machine of course. This was long before the days of desktop publishing, and you could hear him down the corridor absolutely hammering the keyboard."
    • 2024 May 24, Timothy Garton Ash, “Ukraine can still recover with bolder western support – but right now it’s on the ropes”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN, archived from the original on 14 December 2024:
      So Ukraine is on the ropes. Using that boxing metaphor, one immediately thinks of the new world heavyweight champion, the Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk, who was seemingly down and out under the ferocious assault of the giant Tyson Fury, but then came back to win on points at the end of a brutal 12 rounds.
  2. Extreme or intense.

Synonyms

Derived terms

Translations

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