Stubborn is refusing to change your mind when everyone in the room can see that you should. Arms folded, one more no, the argument that nobody wins because the other person will not move an inch.
It is not always an insult. Stubborn can name the good kind of persistence, the refusal to give up on a sick friend or a lost cause, and English marks the difference with tone rather than with another word. Things are stubborn too, and there it means resisting every effort: a stubborn stain, a stubborn lid, a stubborn cough that hangs on for a month. The fixed comparison is as stubborn as a mule. The noun is stubbornness and the adverb stubbornly, as in she stubbornly refused. Next to it, determined is the compliment and pig-headed the insult, with stubborn sitting between them.
1adjectivestubbornRefusing to change your mind or your behaviour, whatever anyone says.
“He is too stubborn to admit he took the wrong turning.”
synonyms: obstinate, headstrong, pig-headed
2adjectivehardHard to remove or deal with, however much effort you put in.
“A stubborn ring of grease was left round the pan.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Nobody knows where stubborn came from, which is fitting. It appears in Middle English in a pile of spellings, stiborne, stibourne, styburne, with no clear parent. One guess ties it to Old English stybb, "a stump", so a stubborn person would be someone rooted in the ground like a tree stump that will not come out.
Old English
*stybbor
Middle English
stiborne
English, today
stubborn
From Middle English stiborne, stibourne, stoburn, stoburne, styburne, stiborn, of unknown origin; one hypothesis is that it may be from Old English stybbor, from Old English stybb (“a stump, stub”) + -or.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA