bricoleur
Americannoun
plural
bricoleurs-
a person who makes or creates something from whatever materials are at hand or easily available.
-
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.
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.
“He’s a bricoleur, puttering about with whatever comes to hand.”
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 2, 2019
The book calls upon this faculty as it swerves from point to point, from the critic Arthur Koestler’s “bisociation” theory of creativity to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s related concept of the bricoleur, the collage artist.
From The New Yorker • Dec. 14, 2018
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
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.
