bricoleur
Americannoun
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a person who makes or creates something from whatever materials are at hand or easily available.
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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
Noun Inflected Forms
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:
“He’s a bricoleur, puttering about with whatever comes to hand.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 2, 2019
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
He was a gargantuan bricoleur, a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions.
From Time Magazine Archive
Not lyric poets then, or even jongleurs, but bricoleurs, who occupy a separate category because they work across genres.
From The Guardian ● Oct. 21, 2016
The grooviest of them all were arguably the bricoleurs, engineers in garages, who used “whatever comes to hand”.
From Nature ● May 31, 2016
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.
