stiff-necked

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stiff-necked

(stĭf′nĕkt′)

adj.

Stubborn and arrogant or aloof.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

stiff-necked

adj

haughtily stubborn or obstinate

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

stiff′-necked′

adj.

1. having a stiff neck; having torticollis.

2. haughty and obstinate; refractory.

[1520–30]

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Adj.

stiff-necked - haughtily stubborn; "a stiff-necked old Boston brahmin"

obstinate, stubborn, unregenerate - tenaciously unwilling or marked by tenacious unwillingness to yield

stiff-necked

adjective

Tenaciously unwilling to yield:

bullheaded, dogged, hardheaded, headstrong, mulish, obstinate, pertinacious, perverse, pigheaded, tenacious, willful.

Translations

stiff-necked

[ˈstɪfˈnekt] ADJ (fig) → porfiado, terco

Collins Spanish Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged 8th Edition 2005 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1971, 1988 © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005

stiff-necked

adj (fig) → halsstarrig

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

stiff-necked

[ˈstɪfˈnɛkt] adj (pej) → ostinato/a, cocciuto/a

References in classic literature ?

If Heaven bore with the whole nation of stiff-necked unbelievers for more years than a layman can number, we may endure the presence of one Jew for a few hours.

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Then he had been seized upon by Danglars, who, with a rapid glance at the stiff-necked old major and his modest son, and taking into consideration the hospitality of the count, made up his mind that he was in the society of some nabob come to Paris to finish the worldly education of his heir.

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Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with no great quantity of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and sides of his head.

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She was unlike most other girls of her age, in this--that she had ideas of her own, and was stiff-necked enough to set the fashions themselves at defiance, if the fashions didn't suit her views.

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Truly, those of the cloth do not love me overmuch, and when it comes to doing as I desire in such a matter, they are as like as not to prove stiff-necked. As to the lesser clergy, they fear to do me a favor because of abbot or bishop.

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Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers of their House; whether they sat in its long low windows telling their beads for their mortification, instead of making necklaces of them for their adornment; whether they were ever walled up alive in odd angles and jutting gables of the building for having some ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them which has kept the fermenting world alive ever since; these may be matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute no item in Miss Twinkleton's half-yearly accounts.