picaro
Americannoun
-
picaros
plural
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of picaro
First recorded in 1615–25, picaro is from the Spanish word pícaro rogue
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:
Initially it seemed to be the first-person adventures of an intellectual picaro charting his disenchantment with Los Angeles, the Esalen Institute, M.I.T., think tanks and other outposts of American culture.
From Time Magazine Archive
His friend and foil is Rich Bone, a handsome and once successful corporate executive who sees life's flaws so clearly that he has retreated to become a sort of passive picaro.
From Time Magazine Archive
Even within sight of its grandest cities there are places of concealment—harbours of refuge—alike free to the political patriot, and the outlawed picaro.
From The Bandolero A Marriage among the Mountains by Mayne Reid
His partiality may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination toward the life of art, through which his 'Genius' moves, half hero and half picaro.
From Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) by Carl Van Doren
There is too Piers Plain, now a shepherd but formerly nothing short of a picaro, who has seen much and has followed many trades, and served many masters.
From The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare by J. J. Jusserand
In 1947, upon Gertrude Stein’s suggestion, Paul settled in Tangier, a seedy port city where artists, pirates, picaros, philistines, homosexuals, lapsed aristocrats, real aristocrats, and paupers posing as kings had found refuge for centuries.
From The New Yorker ● Jun. 13, 2014
Philosophers abandoned their estates to contemplate natural and divine things, the movements of the heavens, with less distraction; picaros do it to sow all their wild oats.
From The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes; his fortunes and misfortunes as told by himself by Robert S. Rudder
Philosophers threw their goods into the sea; picaros throw them in their stomachs.
From The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes; his fortunes and misfortunes as told by himself by Robert S. Rudder
The picaros of this dirty little town are as conceited as pigs.
From Romance by Joseph Conrad
Philosophers despised those things as vain and transitory; while picaros don't care for them because they bring along cares and work—something that goes against their profession.
From The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes; his fortunes and misfortunes as told by himself by Robert S. Rudder
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.
