Badass

/ˈbædæs/ · noun

Meaning

(US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, negative connotation) A belligerent or mean person; a person with an unpleasantly extreme appearance, attitudes, or behavior..

Definitions by Sense

1. (US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, negative connotation) A belligerent or mean person; a person with an unpleasantly extreme appearance, attitudes, or behavior.
2. (US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, positive connotation) A person considered impressive due to courage, skill, daring, audacity, and/or toughness.
3. (US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, negative connotation) Belligerent and troublesome.
4. (US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, positive connotation) Having an extreme appearance, attitude, or behavior that is considered admirable.

Example Sentences

Don’t mess with that guy, he’s a real badass.

A shake down officer, Sgt. Soaper, and Capt. Swarts, have been reading all my mail, including GCN (which is authorized to come in). Soaper has been sending the prison bad-asses to my cell to force me to have sex with them. Yesterday, Soaper opened my door and 2 prisoners came in and raped me. Capt. Swarts told me that he was going to make me pay for writing letters to GCN and that there was nothing anyone could do about it.

There are badasses, and there are badasses. Dothan is one of the latter, from a family full of badasses. I'm not saying he isn't a decent sort. He's fully rational, not like his brother Curtis. But Christ, when the sombitch gets mad …

A survival tactic I learned on the psych ward was how to quickly size up potential enemies or garden-variety badasses.

You're a badass but you ain't no criminal.

They flew the Jolly Roger to signal their reputation for mayhem but, in fact, the pirates didn't actually want a fight, because fighting is costly and dangerous and might result in economic loss. […] Of course, to maintain a reputation that you are a badass, you actually have to occasionally be a badass, so pirates intermittently engaged in violence, reports of which they happily provided to newspaper editors, who duly published them in gory and exaggerated detail.

"I'm a badass." (Jack Nicholson to a New York friend, early 1973.)

The Oakland Raiders are one of the few teams that I have any feelings for besides the Steelers. Nowadays they're a bunch of wannabe badasses, but back in the day they were something to behold.

Synonyms for badass

Antonyms for badass

Related Words

Word Forms

• badasses
• bad-ass
• bad ass
• bad-arse
• badarse
• bad arse
• more badass
• most badass

Usage Notes

Choose a synonym only when it preserves the intended meaning, tone, and grammar of the full sentence.

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