Word.ws English Dictionary

brinkman

brinkman noun: one who advocates for brinkmanship.

Noun

brinkman (plural brinkmen)

  1. One who advocates for brinkmanship.
    • It compels the 'brinkmen' to realise that, if they seek to make war on the Soviet Union, they cannot count on cooperation from Britain or France, and probably not from Western Germany.1958, The Labour Monthly, volume 40, page 18
    • The brinkmen Kennan abhorred were supreme realists, and if "the assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment" is baseless, then anything, even the realism of atomic blackmail, would be permissible.1970, John W. Coffey, Realist social thought in America: Reinhold Niebuhr and George F. Kennan

Proper noun capitalized: Brinkman

Brinkman (plural Brinkmans)

  1. A surname.

Forms of brinkman

Noun
pluralbrinkmen
alternative formbrinksman
Proper noun
pluralBrinkmans

Origin of brinkman

Back-formation from brinkmanship, equivlent to brink + -man.

Borrowed from Dutch Brinkman or a variant of German Brinkmann. Either way, equivalent to brink ("edge, border") + man ("person, human; male human").

Questions about brinkman

What does brinkman mean?
Brinkman means one who advocates for brinkmanship.
What part of speech is brinkman?
Brinkman can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of brinkman?
The plural of brinkman is brinkmen.

Words near brinkman in the dictionary

  1. Brinklers
  2. brinkless
  3. Brinkley
  4. Brinklow
  5. Brinklows
  6. brinkman
  7. Brinkmann
  8. Brinkmann coordinates
  9. Brinkmanns
  10. Brinkmans
  11. brinkmanship

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brinkman (page history and authors); Brinkman (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.

Last updated:

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