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chutzpah

British  
/ ˈxʊtspə /

noun

  1. informal shameless audacity; impudence

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
chutzpah Cultural  

  1. Yiddish term for courage bordering on arrogance, roughly equivalent to “nerve” (in the slang sense): “It took a lot of chutzpah to make such a controversial statement.”

Etymology

Origin of chutzpah

C20: from Yiddish

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.

He added: "Nigel Farage has chutzpah to return to the stage and say 'things are disastrous, and I'm the person to fix it'."

From BBC • Mar. 18, 2026

Launching a business without your knowledge when you were about to give birth takes some chutzpah.

From MarketWatch • Mar. 2, 2026

Four years later, he had enough arriviste chutzpah to run for state governor as the candidate for the Liberty Union Party—a leftist Vermont grouping.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 29, 2026

Yiddish, the language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews across Europe before the Holocaust, is now perhaps best known to many English speakers through words such as "schlep", "klutz" and "chutzpah".

From Barron's • Oct. 26, 2025

Worrying about Max and the failure of my chutzpah.

From "The Light in Hidden Places" by Sharon Cameron

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.