intrepid
adjective
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Don't Be Afraid to Learn About Intrepid
If you’re going to name a ship, whether an aircraft carrier or an interstellar starship, you could do worse than to name it the Intrepid, as both the United States military and Star Trek writers have done, respectively. (Technically “Intrepid” is a class of Trek ships that includes the Voyager, etc., but you get the drift.) Intrepid, after all, comes from the Latin word intrepidus, itself formed by the combination of the prefix in-, meaning “not,” and the adjective trepidus, meaning “alarmed.” When not designating sea or space vessels, intrepid aptly describes anyone—from explorers to reporters—who ventures bravely into unknown territory, though often you’ll see the word loaded with irony, as in “an intrepid couch surfer endeavored to watch every installment of the beloved sci-fi series in chronological order.” Intrepid word lovers may be interested to know of the existence of trepid, meaning “fearful”; it predates intrepid but most are too trepid (or simply unaware of its existence) to use it.
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Examples of intrepid in a Sentence
Jonathan Chait, New York Times Book Review, 3 Feb. 2008
Author and explorer Dame Freya Stark was one of the most intrepid adventurers of all time. (T. E. Lawrence, no slouch in the travel department himself, called her "gallant" and "remarkable.")
—Kimberly Robinson, Travel & Leisure, December 1999
Meanwhile, the intrepid Florentine traveler Marco Polo had been to China and brought back with him a noodle dish that became Italian pasta …
—Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 1993
an intrepid explorer who probed parts of the rain forest never previously attempted
Craig Hooper, Forbes, 10 Jan. 2025
Photographer David Northall of the United Kingdom watched as the intrepid hunter grabbed the cape porcupine’s back right leg.
—Carlyn Kranking, Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Jan. 2025
Just recently there has been news of a pair of satellites creating artificial solar eclipses to study the sun; scientists preparing to receive signals from spacecraft after a historic close encounter with the sun; and an intrepid mission to retrieve rocks from the surface of Mars.
—Manuela López Restrepo, NPR, 10 Jan. 2025
After decades of morally simplistic cowboys-and-Indians movies that reinforced the intrepid self-image of a rising world power, revisionist westerns proliferated during the Vietnam War, critiquing the violence of white imperialism.
—Judy Berman, TIME, 9 Jan. 2025
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“Intrepid.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intrepid. Accessed 18 Jan. 2025.
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intrepid
adjective
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