Word.ws English Dictionary

bricoleur

bricoleur noun: a person who constructs bricolages; one who creates using whatever materials are available.

Noun

bricoleur (plural bricoleurs)

  1. A person who constructs bricolages; one who creates using whatever materials are available.
    • The engineer has science to guide him; the bricoleur has intuition. Significantly, while the bricoleur can only classify perceived differences, the engineer's scientific system enables him to classify things not yet seen.2002, Sherene H. Razack, editor, Introduction: Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, page 12
    • The bricoleur’s awareness of constructivism and historicity helps her point out these omissions and their effects on the knowledge-production processes.
      In this context critical hermeneutics facilitates bricoleurs’ attempts to identify socially oppressive forms of meaning-making and research...2004, Joe L. Kincheloe, Kathleen S. Berry, Rigour and Complexity in Educational Research: Conceptualizing the bricolage, page 11

Examples of bricoleur in a sentence

  • The bricoleur is a specialist in combinatorial logic, a craftsman who creates objects by rearranging other objects.2007, Boris Wiseman, Levi-Strauss, Anthropology, and Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, page 208:
  • We see in this picture what a potent political bricoleur he is, borrowing images and rhetoric from any source and combining them in new, lucid collages with changed meanings.2024 July 15, Jonathan Jones, “‘Is this what a second Trump presidency will be like?’ – our art critic on the chilling shooting image”, in...

Forms of bricoleur

pluralbricoleurs

Origin of bricoleur

From French bricoleur; apparently a borrowing from the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Questions about bricoleur

What does bricoleur mean?
Bricoleur means a person who constructs bricolages; one who creates using whatever materials are available.
How do you use bricoleur in a sentence?
The bricoleur is a specialist in combinatorial logic, a craftsman who creates objects by rearranging other objects.
What part of speech is bricoleur?
Bricoleur is a noun.
What is the plural of bricoleur?
The plural of bricoleur is bricoleurs.

Words near bricoleur in the dictionary

  1. bricolages
  2. bricolagist
  3. bricolagists
  4. bricole
  5. bricoles
  6. bricoleur
  7. bricoleurs
  8. BRICS
  9. bridal
  10. bridal bower
  11. bridal bowers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bricoleur (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bricoleur.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bricoleur. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.