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bricoleur

American  
[bri-kuh-ler] / ˌbrɪ kəˈlər /

noun

bricoleurs plural
  1. a person who makes or creates something from whatever materials are at hand or easily available.

  2. a person who, often through necessity, is able to do a variety of manual work and is able to solve problems with the materials at hand.


Other Word Forms

Inflected Forms

noun

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.

Joan Didion, a student of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and a steel-edged bricoleur of upper-middle-class fantasy, wrote obsessively of flights and hotels.

From The New Yorker • Feb. 1, 2016

To answer those questions, we’ll need to imagine our way back to a galaxy, far, far away, when George Lucas was an artsy film student and budding bricoleur.

From Slate • Dec. 13, 2015

Luttwak is less a grand political theorist in the tradition of Machiavelli or Hobbes than a skilled bricoleur of historical strategic insights.

From The Guardian • Dec. 9, 2015

Whitten engages paint and canvas as the materials of a bricoleur.

From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 22, 2014

He was a gargantuan bricoleur, a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions.

From Time Magazine Archive

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