adamant

adjective

1. 1

   Firm; unshakeable; unyielding; determined.

   Broiles and Kirkley were adamant about getting out of the lawsuit, but Mike and Dee were equally adamant about not wanting to sign a letter of apology

   Johan is determined to play the field and adamant about never committing.

   What good would such foolishness do a mountain man? But Pa had been adamant. Just as he'd been adamant about their reading, writing, numbers, geography, and languages. Just as he'd been adamant about using proper grammar

   Most Panamanians are adamant that the canal, completed in 1914, will not return to U.S. control.

2. 2

   Very difficult to break, pierce, or cut.

   Unprotected matter, however adamant, would have been ground to dust ages ago.

noun

1. 1

   An unspecified mineral or rock of virtually impenetrable hardness.

   This then is and alwayes hath ben the fashion of Worldlinges, & reprobate persons, to harden their hartes as an adamant stone, against anye thinge that shalbe tolde the for amendement of their lives, and for the savinge of their soules.

   As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead […]

   But this was a finale she ever avoided: an offer, like the rock of adamant in Sinbad's voyages, finishes the attraction by destroying the vessel; […]

2. 2

   historicalAn unspecified mineral or rock of virtually impenetrable hardness. In later use: diamond.

3. 3

   archaicAn unspecified mineral or rock of virtually impenetrable hardness. In later use: a lodestone.

   You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant: / But yet you draw not iron, for all my heart / Is true as steel. Leave you your power to draw, / And I shall have no power to follow you.

4. 4

   An unspecified mineral or rock of virtually impenetrable hardness. A substance that neutralizes lodestones.

   An Adamant hinders the attractive vertue, as also Garlick rubbed on the Magnet; for its attractive faculty is not so valid, but it may be easily deluded, obscured, and superated […]

   But we know from book 37 of the Natural History that adamant works on magnets in exactly the same way that garlic does: robbing them of their power to attract.

5. 5

   figurativeChiefly in of adamant: an embodiment of impenetrable hardness; the quality of not being easily destroyed or overcome; impenetrableness, imperviousness, impregnableness; also, of a person: the quality of not being easily affected emotionally; impassiveness, unmovableness.

   Actual life might seem to her so real that she could not detect the union of shadow and adamant that men call poetry.

6. 6

   figurativeA person or thing having the quality of attracting or drawing; a lodestone, a magnet.

Forms

plural

adamants

comparative

more adamant

superlative

most adamant