Word.ws English Dictionary

macho-ish

macho-ish adjective: somewhat macho.

Adjective

macho-ish (comparative more macho-ish, superlative most macho-ish)

  1. (informal) Somewhat macho.
    • A collector of guns and knives, [Charles Alvin] Beckwith testified that he read Soldier of Fortune mostly for its gun and knife reviews. He rarely looked at the personal-services ads, and had never suspected any criminal intent. “You read one of these, it sounds so macho-ish,” he said. “It just...1992 January, Ben Green, “Part Seven: Graven Images”, in The Soldier of Fortune Murders: A True Story of Obsessive Love and Murder-for-Hire, New York, N.Y.: Delacorte Press, →ISBN, section 2, pages...
    • Good looking, tall, macho-ish and strong but with a soft heart and a witty tongue.2001 September 14, mogliettina_1, quotee, “A Portrait of One Forum’s Grief”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, published 11 September 2002, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived...

Examples of macho-ish in a sentence

  • “You read one of these, it sounds so macho-ish,” he said.1992 January, Ben Green, “Part Seven: Graven Images”, in The Soldier of Fortune Murders: A True Story of Obsessive Love and...
  • The macho-ish option: For lashings of pampering, mixed with a dab of grizzle, try Argentina.2012 February 9, “Trips of a lifetime”, in The Times, London: News UK, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 05 Aug 2025:

Forms of macho-ish

comparativemore macho-ish
superlativemost macho-ish
alternative formmachoish

Origin of macho-ish

From macho + -ish.

Questions about macho-ish

What does macho-ish mean?
Macho-ish means somewhat macho.
How do you use macho-ish in a sentence?
“You read one of these, it sounds so macho-ish,” he said.
What part of speech is macho-ish?
Macho-ish is an adjective.

Words near macho-ish in the dictionary

  1. macho dancer
  2. macho dancers
  3. macho man
  4. macho men
  5. macho up
  6. macho-ish
  7. machodom
  8. machoed up
  9. machoflops
  10. machohood
  11. machoing up

Source and license

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