31 January 2016

sans-culotte

[sanz-kyoo-lot, -koo-; French sahn-ky-lawt]

noun, plural sans-culottes [sanz-kyoo-lots, -koo-; French sahn-ky-lawt]

1. (in the French Revolution) a revolutionary of the poorer class: originally a term of contempt applied by the aristocrats but later adopted as a popular name by the revolutionaries.
2. any extreme republican or revolutionary.

Origin of sans-culotte

1780-1790; < French: literally, without knee breeches

Related forms

sans-culottic [sanz-kyoo-lot-ik, -koo-], adjective
sans-culottish, adjective
sans-culottism, noun
sans-culottist, noun

Dictionary.com

Examples from the Web for sans-culotte

Historical Examples

Fancy living in a room with David’s sans-culotte Leonidas staring perpetually in your face!
The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh
William Makepeace Thackeray

Dr. Mivers was as much scouted as if he had been a sans-culotte.
Lucretia, Complete
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

But Boivin was a soldier, and a soldier is not a sans-culotte.
The Historical Nights’ Entertainment
Rafael Sabatini

Anagram

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cleat snouts

Today’s quote

Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.

– Unknown.

On this day

31 January 1606 – death of Guy Fawkes, English soldier and one of the masterminds behind the failed ‘Gunpowder Plot’ to blow up English Parliament in an effort to assassinate King James 1 and VI of Scotland. Born 13 April 1570.

31 January 1961 – Ham the Astrochimp, returns safely to Earth after completing a NASA mission into outer space. HAM is an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Centre, which was located at the Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.

31 January 1991 – McDonald’s opens its first restaurant in Moscow.