Word.ws English Dictionary

fireeater

fireeater is the alternative form of fire-eater.

Meaning of fire-eater

Noun

fire-eater (plural fire-eaters)

  1. A performer who pretends to swallow fire.
    Synonyms:
    firebreather, fire-breather, fire breather
  2. (figuratively) A quarrelsome or belligerent person.
    • "But he is a regular fire eater!"
      "He's a bad man—a blamed bad man!" fluttered Danny Griswold.
      "That's right," nodded Lewis Little. "He really wants to fight with swords, I believe."Burt L. Standish (Gilbert Patten)
  3. (US, historical) An extreme partisan for the South before the US Civil War.
    • Frustrated in their attempts to change the law, fire-eaters turned their efforts to breaking it.1988, James McPherson, Battle Cry for Freedom, Oxford, published 2003, page 103

Forms of fireeater

pluralfireeaters

Origin of fireeater

From fire + eater.

Questions about fireeater

What is fireeater the alternative form of?
Fireeater is the alternative form of fire-eater.

Words near fireeater in the dictionary

  1. firedragon
  2. firedragons
  3. firedrake
  4. firedrakes
  5. firee
  6. fireeater
  7. fireeaters
  8. firees
  9. firefall
  10. firefalls
  11. firefan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fireeater (page history and authors); fire-eater (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: “fireeater.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fireeater. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.