virtùous
virtùous adjective: involving the cleverness and understanding to accomplish one's goals.
Adjective
virtùous (comparative more virtùous, superlative most virtùous)
- Involving the cleverness and understanding to accomplish one's goals.
- For instance, in his virtùous retelling of the David and Goliath story, Machiavelli equips David with a knife as well as a sling: one’s own good arms replace divine favor.1995, Diana Schaub, Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, →ISBN, page 102
- Virtue, Machiavelli instructed, was possible only when it was enclosed, but even within the virtùous state its quantity was finite.2004, Scott G. Nelson, “Sovereignty, ethics, community”, in Philosophy & Social Criticism, volume 30, number 7, →DOI, page 820
Forms of virtùous
| comparative | more virtùous |
|---|---|
| superlative | most virtùous |
| alternative form | virtù-ous |
Origin of virtùous
From Italian virtù + ous, after virtuous, a piecewise doublet.
Questions about virtùous
- What does virtùous mean?
- Virtùous means involving the cleverness and understanding to accomplish one's goals.
- What part of speech is virtùous?
- Virtùous is an adjective.
Words near virtùous in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: virtùous (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: “virtùous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/virt%C3%B9ous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.