noun
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a loud, violent, and ill-tempered woman; scold; shrew
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archaic a strong, brave, or warlike woman; amazon
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of virago
before 1000; Middle English, Old English < Latin virāgō, equivalent to vir man + -āgō suffix expressing association of some kind, here resemblance
Explanation
A virago is a loud, bossy woman, like your next door neighbor who is always yelling at kids to get off her lawn. You can use the noun virago when you're describing a particularly mean and scolding woman. It's not a compliment to call someone a virago, although its origins are much nobler than the shrewish, screechy character it implies today. Originally, a virago was a brave or heroic woman. The root of virago is the Latin word for "man," vir. In other words, a virago used to mean a woman who seemed manly or virile.
Vocabulary lists containing virago
Twelfth Night
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"Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving
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"American History" by Judith Ortiz Cofer
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Ms. Boycott chose the name — a virago is defined both as a strong, heroic woman and as a harpy — and it fit the mission, and perhaps also Ms. Callil’s persona.
From New York Times ● Oct. 29, 2022
Yet, tellingly, this virago is also the creation of a male writer-director.
From The Guardian ● Jan. 11, 2018
“HLN’s virago of vengeance,” the New York Times dubbed her in 2011.
From Slate ● Oct. 13, 2016
“Jackson is an awesome virago who delivers her lines like bayonet thrusts,” Time magazine drama critic T.E.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 14, 2016
It was all of red brick, and looked square and formal enough, with the two wings projecting like the a-kimbo arms of some untamed virago, straight and resolute as a redoubt.
From The Smuggler: (Vol's I-III) A Tale by G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James
Hagen can be one of the stage's great ripsnorting viragoes, as she demonstrated last year off-Broadway in the title role of Shaw's Mrs.Warren's Profession.
From Time Magazine Archive
Wodehouse still lives in the same cloud-cuckoo land of titled old blighters, muscular viragoes and fluffy-minded bachelors that he first celebrated 67 books ago.
From Time Magazine Archive
Yet there are viragoes who have had the indecency to call gallantry an "insult to woman."
From Primitive Love and Love-Stories by Henry Theophilus Finck
It was only by mob misunderstanding that the suffragettes were conceived as viragoes, just as it was only by mob misunderstanding that the members of the Society of Friends were conceived as desperadoes.
From The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21 The Recent Days (1910-1914) by Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
I shouldn't make it one of your hoity-toity vixenish viragoes.
From The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan by Sir W. S. (William Schwenck) Gilbert
When transgender entered the popular lexicon through the efforts of activists and aid organizations in the mid-1990s, it replaced transsexual, which had replaced transvestite, which was what they called cross-dressers and before that viragos.
From Slate ● May 14, 2018
This hag was a reputed witch and fortune-teller, and acted as president of the young viragos, several of whom, it was afterwards ascertained, belonged to the first families of Rome.
From Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions — Volume 2 by Charles Mackay
Even the honest friendship between him and the remarkable woman he calls his "viragos" gives him many a pleasant hour.
From A Woman-Hater by Charles Reade
Little Asako had nothing in common with the argumentative heroines of Bernard Shaw or with the desperate viragos of Ibsen, to whom Sadako felt herself spiritually akin.
From Kimono by John Paris
The study of these viragos scales down our rating of the master.
From Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 04 Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters by Elbert Hubbard
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
