Audacious means bold in a way that makes people gasp. A thief who walks out of the museum in daylight with the painting under his arm; a nineteen-year-old who writes to the director and asks for the job.
It is stronger than brave and stronger than daring: audacious says the boldness went past what anybody expected, and it arrives with a small shock attached. Newspapers love it for robberies, escapes and business deals — an audacious raid, an audacious bid, an audacious plan. It leans the other way as well, towards cheek with no respect in it: an audacious question at a funeral is not a compliment. The noun is audacity, and 'the audacity of the man' is nearly always a complaint. The adverb is audaciously, and it sits in front of adjectives: audaciously expensive.
1adjectiveaudaciousBold in a surprising, risky way.~83%
“It was an audacious plan, and it very nearly worked.”
2adjectiveimpudentBold to the point of rudeness, showing no respect at all.~17%
“He made an audacious request and did not even blink.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Audacious is Latin nerve with an English ending. Latin audeō meant to be bold, to dare; from it came audax, bold, and audacia, boldness — and English added -ious to that last one. The daring has been inside the word from the beginning.
Latin
audacia — boldness
English, today
audacious
Built from
From Latin audacia (“boldness”) + -ious, from audax (“bold”), from audeō (“to be bold, to dare”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA