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macho

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈmæt͡ʃ.əʊ//
  • United States//ˈmɑ.t͡ʃoʊ//

Masculine in an overly assertive or aggressive way. Very masculine.

adjective

  1. 1

    informalMasculine in an overly assertive or aggressive way. Very masculine.

    macho culture

    I like sports because I enjoy knowing that many of these macho athletes have to vomit before a big game. Any guy who would take a job where you gotta puke first is my kinda guy.

    The government’s “bullish” and “macho” approach to Brexit should not stop Conservative backbenchers from tabling amendments to the crucial repeal bill, a leading Tory remainer has said.

    Joseph Biden has described Donald Trump’s refusal to wear a mask as “macho”, an insult unlikely to wound a president, who, before his illness, began rallies with speakers blasting the Village People’s 1979 song Macho Man.

Etymology

Borrowed from Spanish macho (“male”), from Latin masculus. Doublet of male.

noun

  1. 1

    A macho person; a man who is masculine in an overly assertive or aggressive way.

    You can tell a macho, he has a funky walk / His western shirts and leather, always look so boss

  2. 2

    A very masculine man.

  3. 3

    Machismo

    […] about how the military is anti-gay and uses intimidation and peer pressure. How it promotes a sense of false macho and patriotism.

    Though there was plentiful evidence to the contrary that should have made plain to him the hairy masculine macho of German gays, Hitler's stereotyped image perceived them as woman-like, surrendering, and therefore essentially weak.

    On this day, when tens of millions of men, and women, are watching this yearly celebration of American macho, we'd like them to stop and think about the prevalence of male violence against women and what they can do to end it.

  4. 4

    The striped mullet of California (Mugil cephalus, syn. Mugil mexicanus).

  5. 5

    A male llama.

Forms

plural
machos
comparative
more macho
superlative
most macho
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).