moxie
If you have moxie, you won’t let a minor setback stop you from trying again, because you’re a determined person who doesn’t give up easily.
Moxie describes someone with a fighting spirit. A boxer needs moxie in order to get up after being punched in the face, and a computer programmer who spends years building a video game has a lot of moxie. The word moxie comes from a soft drink named Moxie that tastes like sugary cough medicine and claimed it would “build up your nerve.” Someone who is brave enough to drink an entire can of that curious beverage clearly has moxie.
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fortitude and determination
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Vocabulary lists containing moxie
Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus. He is language columnist for The Boston Globe and the former "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. We asked Ben, as an expert on the history of American English, to give us some of his favorite words that originated in the United States. "I'm fascinated by how the English language developed a unique American flavor (not flavour!) beginning in colonial times. I've been collecting examples of great contributions from American English. Here is a cornucopia of copacetic coinages from fertile American minds."
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