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fierce

adjective

Simple meaning

Exceedingly violent, severe, ferocious, cruel or savage.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

firs
US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

ˈfɪɹs

This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

adjective

  1. Exceedingly violent, severe, ferocious, cruel or savage.

  2. Threatening in appearance or demeanor.

  3. Resolute or strenuously active.

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: Exceedingly violent, severe, ferocious, cruel or savage.

Used this way, fierce is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly unfavourable pull. It lands hard, so it overstates anything mild. It turns up most in personal or emotional discussion and literature or storytelling contexts.

Emotional tone
Negative
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Very strong
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
Harsh or blunt
Usage feel
Everyday but emotionally strong

Where it naturally appears

  • Personal/emotional discussion
  • Literature/storytelling

Nearby words

  • savage , more casual, better suited to speech than writing

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

fierce competitionfierce battlefierce strugglefierce fightingfierce oppositionfierce resistancefierce heatfierce anger

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Word family

Words built from the same root.

  • fiercelyadverbDerived adverb

    In a physically fierce manner.

More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin

Synonyms

Sense: exceedingly violent or severe or ferocious or cruel

savageInformalfuriousstormyferocious

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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.