Word.ws English Dictionary

cowardly lion

cowardly lion noun: a person who acts tough but misses a golden opportunity out of fear or cowardice.

Noun

cowardly lion (plural cowardly lions)

  1. (figuratively) A person who acts tough but misses a golden opportunity out of fear or cowardice.
    • "This $13 billion mutual fund, which calls itself "classic growth investing, the Janus way," is in reality a cowardly lion." -Forbes
    • "California is right; we trust Washington state will follow in court. Earlier court decisions against the EPA's Cowardly Lion position on global warming suggest legal action may have good prospects." -Seattle Post Intelligencer

Forms of cowardly lion

pluralcowardly lions

Origin of cowardly lion

After a character in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Questions about cowardly lion

What does cowardly lion mean?
Cowardly lion means a person who acts tough but misses a golden opportunity out of fear or cowardice.
What part of speech is cowardly lion?
Cowardly lion is a noun.
What is the plural of cowardly lion?
The plural of cowardly lion is cowardly lions.

Words near cowardly lion in the dictionary

  1. cowardliest
  2. cowardlily
  3. cowardliness
  4. cowardlinesses
  5. cowardly
  6. cowardly lion
  7. cowardly lions
  8. cowardness
  9. cowardry
  10. cowards
  11. cowardship

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cowardly lion (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: “cowardly lion.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cowardly_lion. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.