Word.ws English Dictionary

right man

right man noun: used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see right, man. Also the alternative form of Right Man.

Noun (1)

right man (plural right men)

  1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see right, man.
    • Never having worked with Sayyidd before, only trusting that his superiors had selected the right man, Bakr was suspicious of Sayyidd's eagerness to abandon all they had worked for up until now.2011, Brad Taylor, One Rough Man, →ISBN

Noun (2) capitalized: Right Man

Right Man (plural Right Men)

  1. A man driven by a manic need for self-esteem, often driven to violence: "the violent man".
    • '[T]he violent man' or the 'Right Man' … is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel he is a 'somebody'. He is obsessed by the question of 'losing face', so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong…
    • Equally interesting is the wild, insane jealousy. Most of us are subject to jealousy, since the notion that someone we care about prefers someone else is an assault on our amour propre. But the Right Man, whose self-esteem is like a constantly festering sore spot, flies into a frenzy at the...
    • The Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. [B]iological studies have confirmed [that] for some odd reason...1984, Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind, 2006, Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology, Afterword, p. 219-220

Also used as

right man is also the alternative form of Right Man.

Forms of right man

pluralright men
pluralRight Men
alternative formright man

Origin of right man

Originally coined in A.E. Van Vogt's 1954 novel The Violent Man, and subsequently promoted by Colin Wilson.

Questions about right man

What does right man mean?
Right man means used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see right, man.
What part of speech is right man?
Right man is a noun.
What is the plural of right man?
The plural of right man is right men.

Words near right man in the dictionary

  1. right lane hogs
  2. right lane hugger
  3. right lane huggers
  4. right lateral
  5. right lymphatic duct
  6. right man
  7. right men
  8. right middle lobe syndrome
  9. right now
  10. right of asylum
  11. right of audience

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: right man (page history and authors); Right Man (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: “right man.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/right_man. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.