devil-may-care
devil-may-care adjective: carefree, reckless, irresponsible.
Adjective
devil-may-care (comparative more devil-may-care, superlative most devil-may-care)
- Carefree, reckless, irresponsible.
- This is the sort of witchery, not easily defined—but, by its votaries, pretty sensibly felt, in hunting the fox. The light-hearted, high-spirited stripling, when cigaring it careless to cover, with a kind of a knowing demi-devil-may-care twist of his beaver, receives in his transit a benison from...1837, "Venator", The Warwickshire Hunt from 1795 to 1836, Prefatory Remarks
- Not that this would have worried him much, anyway—he was a mighty free and easy, roving, devil-may-care sort of person.1837, Charles Dickens, chapter 49, in The Pickwick Papers
devil-may-care meaning in Tamil, Malayalam and Indonesian
devil-may-care in Tamil
- கண்மூடித்தனமான, பொறுப்பற்ற
devil-may-care in Malayalam
- rash, reckless, incautious
- കൂസലില്ലാത്ത, അപകടഭീതിയില്ലാത്ത, ഒന്നും വകവയ്ക്കാത്ത, അത്യന്തസാഹസികതയുള്ള, പ്രമത്തനായ, അന്തമില്ലാത്ത
devil-may-care in Indonesian
- carefree
- masa bodoh, peduli setan
Examples of devil-may-care in a sentence
- Now, upon his whole person, from the crown of his unkempt head down to his broken, dusty boots, there yet clung that air of jaunty, devil-may-care rakishness.1910, Jeffery Farnol, chapter 3, in The Broad Highway:
- Nevertheless, some great mistakes were made in Marples' devil-may-care purge that left commuters stranded and seaside resorts without a lifeline.2023 March 8, Howard Johnston, “Was Marples the real railway wrecker?”, in RAIL, number 978, page 50:
Synonyms of devil-may-care
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of devil-may-care
| comparative | more devil-may-care |
|---|---|
| superlative | most devil-may-care |
Origin of devil-may-care
From attributive use of a shortened idiom of the original oath or expression: The devil may care, but I do not.
Questions about devil-may-care
- What does devil-may-care mean?
- Devil-may-care means carefree, reckless, irresponsible.
- What is devil-may-care in Tamil?
- Devil-may-care in Tamil is கண்மூடித்தனமான, பொறுப்பற்ற. See Devil-may-care meaning in Tamil.
- How do you use devil-may-care in a sentence?
- Now, upon his whole person, from the crown of his unkempt head down to his broken, dusty boots, there yet clung that air of jaunty, devil-may-care rakishness.
- What part of speech is devil-may-care?
- Devil-may-care is an adjective.
Words near devil-may-care in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: devil-may-care (page history and authors); devil-may-care (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); devil-may-care (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)-Vealhurl-devil-may-care.wav.
Cite this entry: “devil-may-care.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/devil-may-care. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.