cavalier
/ˈkæ.vəˌlir/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.17 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
adj
adj
Of or pertaining to the party of King Charles I of England (1600–1649).
noun
A military man serving on horse, (chiefly) early modern cavalry officers who had abandoned the heavy armor of medieval knights.
noun
A gallant: a sprightly young dashing military man.
Example Sentences
- "But, on the following day, no sign of Poirot. I was getting angry. He was really treating us in the most cavalier fashion."
- "Such a cavalier attitude might seem to suggest that doctors consider the uterus as dispensable an organ as, say, an appendix—and some feminists have accused the medical profession of just such callousness […]"
- "For another example, see Palumbo, Rudd, and Whelan (2006), who found that several empirical consumption papers from the 1980s and 1990s took a cavalier approach to deflation and measurement that unfortunately affected their results."
- "Leporello (a surname that proved the antechamber not to be wholly illiterate), far from resembling Don Juan’s trembling valet, was a handsome young man, with an animated face, nimble in gait, and of cavalier manners; wearing elegantly enough the clothes which had, doubtless, appertained to his master; and evidently quite the pet of the ladies present, and paying assiduous court to Mademoiselle Astarté, the queen of the party."
- "The roundheads in the school showers easily equalled the cavaliers."
- "Since penile preference is so tied up with personal aesthetics and body image, it seems both logical and fair to leave the choice of cavalier or roundhead to the owner of the organ, thus avoiding the sort of life-long pain expressed in a comment like this:[…]"
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Celtic *kaballosder.? Latin caballus Proto-Indo-European *-yósder. Proto-Italic *-āzios Latin -āriusnom. Latin -ārius Late Latin caballāriusder. Old Occitan cavalierbor. Old Italian cavalierebor. Middle French cavalierbor. English cavalier First appears c. 1562 in a translation by Peter Whitehorne. Borrowed from Middle French cavalier (“horseman”), itself borrowed from Old Italian cavaliere (“mounted soldier, knight”), borrowed from Old Occitan cavalier, from Late Latin caballārius (“horseman”), from Latin caballus (“horse”), probably from Gaulish caballos 'nag', variant of cabillos (compare Welsh ceffyl, Breton kefel, Irish capall), akin to German (Swabish) Kōb 'nag' and Old Church Slavonic кобꙑла (kobyla) 'mare'. Previous English forms include cavalero and cavaliero. Doublet of caballero and chevalier.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈkæ.vəˌlir/
Usage
Inflected Forms
more cavalier (comparative)
most cavalier (superlative)
cavaliers (plural)
cavaliers (present, singular)
cavaliering (participle, present)
cavaliered (participle, past)
cavaliered (past)