boldly forward in speech or behavior; impertinent; saucy.
jaunty and stylish; chic; natty.
lively; sprightly; in good health.
Obsolete. clever.
saucy, impudent, or forward
jaunty
a pert little hat
obsolete clever or brisk
1200–50; Middle English, aphetic variant of apert < Old French < Latin apertus open (past participle of aperīre; see aperient); in Middle English and Old French, influenced by Old French aspert < Latin expertus expert
P(rogram) E(valuation and) R(eview) T(echnique)
This sassy little adjective pert is lively and bold, like your pert best friend who storms in and demands to borrow your favorite jacket. Although pert is found inside its synonym impertinent, "rudely bold," pert can also mean stylish, like that pert fedora cocked at a jaunty angle. Someone healthy and bright-eyed is pert, too. You might be pert after a strong cup of coffee and a pep talk, or after a visit from the celebrity stylist. Although pert has been around since the 1300s — from Middle English, “unconcealed, bold” — it is also the name of a shampoo that embraces all shades of meaning of this four-letter word.
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Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch and written by his frequent collaborator Samson Raphaelson, this Paramount picture, running a pert 82 minutes, positively shimmers with wit and sizzles with innuendo.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 10, 2026
Boonbunchachoke’s strange and funny script is constructed of multiple nesting stories, like how my own vacuum pops out a pert little dustbuster that really digs into the cracks.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 4, 2026
Smug, as we use it as a synonym for conceited or self-righteous, emerged from its earlier sense of “neat and trim,” which is exactly the ideal of a pert bump.
From Slate ● Jul. 21, 2025
Hilary Duff — forever young, forever pert, forever blond — found a home on the Disney Channel two decades ago as Lizzie McGuire, a self-possessed tween with an animated alter ego.
From New York Times ● Jan. 25, 2022
A similarity in their pert features and slender arching eyebrows indicated that they were probably brother and sister.
From "The Egypt Game" by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
"If you looked at people having surgery, people having chemotherapy, people having no treatment at all, the survival was pretty much twice as long in the group that received PERT."
From BBC ● Mar. 10, 2022
Despite costing just £7 a day only 63% of pancreatic cancer patients in Wales are prescribed PERT, according to Pancreatic Cancer UK.
From BBC ● Mar. 10, 2022
Using PERT, Raborn set precise timetables for each phase of the enormously complicated program, thus assured that everything would mesh without time-wasting gaps or overlaps in the schedule.
From Time Magazine Archive
Thanks largely to PERT, the Polaris missile is programed to be operational in late 1960, two years ahead of schedule.
From Time Magazine Archive
With PERT, each and every phase of construction is detailed and updated on a phalanx of charts.
From Time Magazine Archive
Helen Mirren – sometimes interrogated by a perter, more wayward, youthful version of herself – moves through some 60 years of regality.
From The Guardian ● Mar. 10, 2013
Oft has it been my lot to mark, A proud, conceited, talking spark, Returning from his finished tour, Grown ten times perter than before.
From The American Gentleman's Guide to Politeness and Fashion or, Familiar Letters to his Nephews by Lunettes, Henry
And I thought the woman looked quite a little perter; it duz down-trod folks lots of good to have somebody take their part.
From Samantha at Coney Island and a Thousand Other Islands by Holley, Marietta
Thou shouldst grow perter, or submit to a solitary quarantine, if thou wouldst not infect the whole brood.'
From Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 7 by Richardson, Samuel
God knows there wouldn't 'a' been a perter monkey in the bunch, if so it hadn't come I was scart, or thinkin' of somethin' else, when a hot-box arrived.
From Mr. Scraggs by Phillips, Henry Wallace
They 've paid for a good night's sleep, 'nd it 's my duty as a director uv the Han'bul 'nd St. Jo to pertest ag'in' this disturbance.
From Second Book of Tales by Field, Eugene
Gayest, pertest, most reckless of all, Lady Betty was in her glory.
From Sophia A Romance by Weyman, Stanley John
Then I laughed loudly—it was only a hare, the prettiest and pertest thing imaginable.
From Scottish Ghost Stories by O'Donnell, Elliott
He raised his hand as the pertest of the maids would have answered him, and there followed an uncomfortable pause.
From The Ward of King Canute; a romance of the Danish conquest by Liljencrantz, Ottilie A. (Ottilia Adelina)
"Thank you!" said Madge at her prickly pertest.
From The Messenger by Robins, Elizabeth
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.
