1965–70; shortened from French provocateur provocateur
First recorded in 1970–75; prov(isional) + -o
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Identification of the family instead came from Provo Fire & Rescue, which announced the death of Captain Spencer Long in a statement of its own.
From BBC ● Jul. 20, 2026
Health officials have also imposed temporary restrictions on the school's boys' campus in Provo, Utah, in June.
From BBC ● Jul. 8, 2026
Gemma Keith, a 14-year-old who lives in the Provo, Utah, area, hopes to collect a potato or two this Halloween.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 30, 2025
Ward services like this have brought a consistent comfort and sense of community for Izzy, who came to Provo to study at Brigham Young University a few years ago.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 9, 2025
Get your bags packed, kid, you’re lieading to Provo to the MTC, the Missionary Training Center, then to Canada, where you were supposed to go on the first mission.
From "A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age" by Matt Richtel
Most hackers wouldn’t have even looked at Provos’s old code, assuming that it had been picked over for bugs, Provos said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 14, 2026
We also had the ERG at war with itself over who were the Provos and who were the Real ERG.
From The Guardian ● Mar. 29, 2019
This spring, “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia” will celebrate works from the past, including the Emeryville mud flats sculptures between Berkeley and Oakland and the radical actions of the Dutch group the Provos.
From New York Times ● Jan. 19, 2017
“We have done a lot of work to detect these quickly and to warn users,” Niels Provos, principal software engineer in Google’s infrastructure security group, said in an interview.
From BusinessWeek ● Feb. 15, 2011
War-weary Catholics are increasingly turning their backs on the Provos.
From Time Magazine Archive
With timing Secretary of State Kerry must have viewed as perverse, the Americans, Europeans, Russians and provos met in Geneva the next day to negotiate a deescalation.
From Salon ● Apr. 23, 2014
During the national Liberation Day celebration two weeks ago, 140 provos and other student activists were arrested.
From Time Magazine Archive
He could not help but think of the provos warning nuzzled like that dog's steady cry over and over into the fabric of one's memory swift as searing iron.
From The Land of Look Behind by Brown, Paul Cameron
Shorty grabbed what money there was on the board, and he and Si made a burst of speed which took them out of reach of the "provos" in a few seconds.
From Si Klegg, Book 3 (of 6) Si And Shorty Meet Mr. Rosenbaum, The Spy, Who Relates His Adventures by McElroy, John
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.
