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stubborn

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈstʌbən//
  • United States//ˈstʌbɚn//
  • //ˈstʊbən//

Refusing to move or to change one's opinion; obstinate; firmly resisting; persistent in doing something.

adjective

  1. 1

    Refusing to move or to change one's opinion; obstinate; firmly resisting; persistent in doing something.

    People are pretty stubborn about their political beliefs, so why bother arguing?

    Blood can make a very stubborn stain on fabrics if not washed properly.

  2. 2

    Physically stiff and inflexible; not easily melted or worked.

    Under his hand a stubborn latch sprung noisily […]

Etymology

From Middle English stiborne, stibourne, stoburn, stoburne, styburne, stiborn, of uncertain origin; one hypothesis is that it may be from Old English *stybbor, from Old English stybb (“a stump, stub”) + -or (adjective-formation suffix, as in bitor, whence English bitter).

noun

  1. 1

    informalStubbornness.

    But I have to say that one thing you inherited from your mother is a whole lot of stubborn.

    That takes a lot of stubborn for a seventy-something man.

    Stubborn is not eating pizza out of a square pan because you know it won't taste as good as a round one. Stubborn is spending twelve thousand dollars to fix a five-hundred-dollar truck just because it's “your baby.”

  2. 2

    Variant of stubborn diseaseEllipsis of stubborn disease (“a disease of citrus trees”).

    With evidence that the causal agent of stubborn is spread by insects, control or prevention of this disease will prove more difficult than formerly thought to be.

    Sectorial infection of stubborn could be stable for long periods, but may be manifested once the trees are severely pruned, this causing the system spread of S. citri to other non-infected parts.

Forms

comparative
more stubborn
superlative
most stubborn
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).