Word.ws English Dictionary

cocksure

cocksure adjective: too confident; overconfident.

Adjective

cocksure (comparative more cocksure, superlative most cocksure)

  1. (informal) Too confident; overconfident.
    • I thought myself cocksure of his horse, which he readily promis'd me.1716, Alexander Pope, letter to the Earl of Burlington
    • The persistence of the Past is one of those tragicomic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its claim to a perfect novelty.1906, John Galsworthy, “preface”, in The Man of Property

cocksure meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and Vietnamese

cocksure in Tamil

நம்பத்தக்க, உறுதியாக

cocksure in Urdu

حتمی

cocksure in Malayalam

conceited, arrogant, overweening
ദൃഢവിശ്വാസമുള്ള, നല്ല ഉറപ്പള്ള, സാവഷ്ടംഭ, അമിതമായി ആത്മവിശ്വാസമുള്ള, കവിഞ്ഞ ആത്മവിശാസമുള്ള, പൂർണ്ണനിശ്ചയമുള്ള

cocksure in Vietnamese

overconfident
kiêu ngạo

Examples of cocksure in a sentence

  • These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element.1920, Sinclair Lewis, “XXIII”, in Main Street:
  • No, I've never been more cocksure of any decision in my life.”2022 August 9, Ayo Edebiri & Shana Gohd, “Private School” (7:15 from the start), in What We Do in the Shadows, season 4, episode 5, spoken...

Forms of cocksure

comparativemore cocksure
superlativemost cocksure
alternative formcock-sure

Origin of cocksure

Probably from cock (“rooster”) + sure, early 16th c.

Words formed from cocksure

Questions about cocksure

What does cocksure mean?
Cocksure means too confident; overconfident.
What is cocksure in Tamil?
Cocksure in Tamil is நம்பத்தக்க, உறுதியாக. See Cocksure meaning in Tamil.
How do you use cocksure in a sentence?
These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element.
What part of speech is cocksure?
Cocksure is an adjective.

Words near cocksure in the dictionary

  1. cocksuckery
  2. cocksucking
  3. cocksucking cowboy
  4. cocksucking cowboys
  5. cocksucks
  6. cocksure
  7. cocksurely
  8. cocksureness
  9. cocksurenesses
  10. cocksurety
  11. cockswain

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cocksure (page history and authors); cocksure (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); cocksure (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); cocksure (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-cocksure.wav.

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