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bricoleur

American  
[bri-kuh-lur, bree-] / ˌbrɪ kəˈlɜr, -ˈlʊər, ˌbri- /

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

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

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