obstreperous
adjective
Did you know?
Imagine walking a dog down a sidewalk in a neighborhood full of delicious smells and other temptations—it’s easy to picture your pooch barking and straining at the leash to chase a squirrel, or dragging you toward something enticingly (to them) stinky, right? But can you imagine saying to your doggo in response, “Quit being so obstreperous!” Probably not. Obstreperous has a much more formal flair than words, such as stubborn or unruly, used to describe similar behavior. As such it’s unlikely to be used in casual speech or contexts like the one above. The word comes from a combination of the handy Latin prefix ob- (meaning “against”) and strepere, a verb meaning “to make a noise”; someone who is obstreperous can be thought of as literally making noise to rebel against something, much like a protesting crowd or an unruly child. Strepere has made little noise in the English lexicon, however; in addition to obstreperous it seems only to have contributed to the rarely encountered strepitous and its synonym strepitant, which mean “characterized or accompanied by much noise”—that is, “noisy.”
Synonyms
Examples of obstreperous in a Sentence
Richard Haass, Foreign Affairs, 3 Apr. 2013
Featuring bodies stacked like cords of wood and a bloated S.S. guard dangling from an iron hook, the spread was an obstreperous incursion among the kind of fashion and perfume ads that Miller had once shot or appeared in.
—Chris Wiley, The New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2024
Rachelle and Matthew had told me that Zac had become obstreperous and even menacing toward them, but Howells mentioned several incidents of physical aggression.
—Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2024
The patience that administrators initially displayed toward their most obstreperous students ran out when the antisocial campus bacchanalia, and their tolerance thereof, did reputational damage to their host institutions.
—Noah Rothman, National Review, 2 Jan. 2024
See all Example Sentences for obstreperous 
Dictionary Entries Near obstreperous
Cite this Entry
“Obstreperous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obstreperous. Accessed 28 Nov. 2024.
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obstreperous
adjective
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