Word.ws English Dictionary

pugnatious

pugnatious is the obsolete form of pugnacious.

Meaning of pugnacious

Adjective

pugnacious (comparative more pugnacious, superlative most pugnacious)

  1. Naturally aggressive or hostile; combative; belligerent; bellicose.
    • Not that the doctor was a bully, or even pugnacious, in the usual sense of the word; he had no disposition to provoke a fight, no propense love of quarrelling.1858, Anthony Trollope, chapter 3, in Doctor Thorne. […], volume I, London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC, page 53

Forms of pugnatious

comparativemore pugnatious
superlativemost pugnatious

Questions about pugnatious

What is pugnatious the obsolete form of?
Pugnatious is the obsolete form of pugnacious.

Words near pugnatious in the dictionary

  1. pugnacious
  2. pugnaciously
  3. pugnaciousness
  4. pugnacities
  5. pugnacity
  6. pugnatious
  7. pugne
  8. pugnellid
  9. pugnellids
  10. pugnose
  11. pugnosed

Source and license

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