Word.ws English Dictionary

Shylockian

Shylockian adjective: of, relating to, or in the manner of the character Shylock from Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, such as being hard-hearted, exploitative, avaricious, deceitful, or vengeful.

Adjective

Shylockian (comparative more Shylockian, superlative most Shylockian)

  1. Of, relating to, or in the manner of the character Shylock from Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, such as being hard-hearted, exploitative, avaricious, deceitful, or vengeful.
    • ‘A wilderness of dragons.’ There is a sting in this Shylockian plural, the sharper for coming from a critic, who deserves the title of the poet's best friend.1936, J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, published 1976, page 8

Forms of Shylockian

comparativemore Shylockian
superlativemost Shylockian

Origin of Shylockian

From Shylock + -ian.

Questions about Shylockian

What does Shylockian mean?
Shylockian means of, relating to, or in the manner of the character Shylock from Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, such as being hard-hearted, exploitative, avaricious, deceitful, or vengeful.
What part of speech is Shylockian?
Shylockian is an adjective.

Words near Shylockian in the dictionary

  1. shyish
  2. Shykles
  3. Shyla
  4. shylock
  5. shylocked
  6. Shylockian
  7. shylocking
  8. shylocks
  9. shyly
  10. Shymkent
  11. shyness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Shylockian (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Shylockian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shylockian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.