TENACIOUS • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Tenacious

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/tənˈeɪʃəs/ Listen

adjective

Tenacious adj.

Holding fast, or inclined to hold fast; inclined to retain what is in possession; as, men tenacious of their just rights.

Apt to retain; retentive; as, a tenacious memory.

Having parts apt to adhere to each other; cohesive; tough; as, steel is a tenacious metal; tar is more tenacious than oil.

Apt to adhere to another substance; glutinous; viscous; sticking; adhesive. "Female feet, too weak to struggle with tenacious clay."

Niggardly; closefisted; miserly.

Holding stoutly to one's opinion or purpose; obstinate; stubborn.

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Etymology of 'Tenacious'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Tenacious" Quotes from Famous Books

... As Isidore says (Etym. x) "a person is said to be pertinacious who holds on impudently, as being utterly tenacious." "Pervicacious" has the same meaning, for it signifies that a man "perseveres in his purpose until he is victorious: for the ancients called 'vicia' what we call victory." These the Philosopher (Ethic. vii, 9) calls ischyrognomones, ...

— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... studies are more perplexing and tormenting than those which have to do with the policy of the Brothers as to what shall, and what shall not, be revealed to the outer world. In fact, it is only by students at the same time tenacious and patient—continuously anxious to get at the truths of occult philosophy, but cool enough to bide their time when obstacles come in the way—that what looks, at first sight, like a grudging and miserly policy in this matter on ...

— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... not for nothing that Rover is dog's most common name, and would be ours, but for our too tenacious fear of losing something, to admit, even to ourselves, that we are hankering. There was a man who said: Strange that two such queerly opposite qualities as courage and hypocrisy are the leading characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon! But is not hypocrisy just a product of tenacity, which is again the ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... chiefly the surgeons for not letting him die. No one ever desired life more passionately than Bernard desired death. For some time he clung to the hope that his mind would wear his body out. But his body was too young, too strong, too tenacious of earth to be betrayed by the ...

— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... merely an impairment of the principle of self-government of the States; it constitutes an absolute abandonment of that principle. This does not mean, of course, an immediate abandonment of the practice of State self-government; established institutions have a tenacious life, and moreover there are a thousand practical advantages in State selfgovernment which nobody will think of giving up. But the principle, I repeat, is abandoned altogether if we accept the Eighteenth ...

— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin

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