bull-in-a-china-shop
bull-in-a-china-shop adjective: clumsy, aggressive, without care, concern or self-control.
Adjective
bull-in-a-china-shop (comparative more bull-in-a-china-shop, superlative most bull-in-a-china-shop)
- Clumsy, aggressive, without care, concern or self-control.
- Europe, more so than America, depends heavily on the extraction of Africa's rich natural resources, essential for its prosperity and it will not allow Reagan's bull-in-a-china-shop diplomacy in Africa to rock the boat.1981, Pan-African Publishers (publisher), Africa Now, numbers 1-9, page 81
- With Jane, Allen came on in his usual bull-in-a-china-shop way.1988, Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, page 285
Examples of bull-in-a-china-shop in a sentence
- Most of the people within ear-shot of the vote thought the vote went nay, but Tip in his usual bull-in-a-china-shop manner, rammed it on through declaring it passed.1993 January 29, Lee Mellinger, “MP5 10mm”, in rec.guns (Usenet):
- The bull-in-a-china-shop behavior is tolerated because many administrators think ambitious people should behave this way.1999, Tom Edel, Wake Me When It's Time to Work, page 119:
Forms of bull-in-a-china-shop
| comparative | more bull-in-a-china-shop |
|---|---|
| superlative | most bull-in-a-china-shop |
Questions about bull-in-a-china-shop
- What does bull-in-a-china-shop mean?
- Bull-in-a-china-shop means clumsy, aggressive, without care, concern or self-control.
- How do you use bull-in-a-china-shop in a sentence?
- Most of the people within ear-shot of the vote thought the vote went nay, but Tip in his usual bull-in-a-china-shop manner, rammed it on through declaring it passed.
- What part of speech is bull-in-a-china-shop?
- Bull-in-a-china-shop is an adjective.
Words near bull-in-a-china-shop in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bull-in-a-china-shop (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: “bull-in-a-china-shop.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bull-in-a-china-shop. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.