obstinacy

I

(New American Roget's College Thesaurus)

Refusal to comply

Nouns

1. obstinacy, stubbornness, tenacity, doggedness; obduracy, obduration, insistence, resolution; intransigency, immovability, inflexibility, hardness, willpower; self-will, will of iron, will or mind of one's own; contumacy, pigheadedness, perversity, contrariness, recalcitrance, indocility. Informal, cussedness, hard head and a soft behind. See certainty, unwillingness, resistance, disobedience, heterodoxy.

2. pighead, stickler, mule, diehard, intransigent, holdout. Informal, bitterender, stand-patter, hard nut to crack, tough customer, young Turk.

Verbs — be obstinate, stickle, insist, persist, persevere; fly in the face of facts, be wedded to an opinion, hug a belief; have one's own way or will; have the last word, die hard, fight to the last ditch, not yield an inch, stand firm. Informal, stand pat, fight city hall.

Adjectives

1. obstinate, stubborn, tenacious, persevering, pertinacious, persistent, dogged; obdurate, indurate, insistent, resolute, firm, sturdy, immovable, inflexible, unmoving, unyielding, unbending, not to be moved; rigid, set, settled, fixed, hard; unchangeable, intransigent, inexorable, determined; bullheaded, pigheaded, headstrong, entêté, mulish, stubborn as a mule, tough. Informal, bitter-end, diehard, hardline, hardcore.

2. self-willed, willful, perverse, heady, headstrong, refractory, unruly, intractable, incorrigible, contumacious, difficult, balky, contrary, froward, cantankerous, recalcitrant; stiff-necked or -backed, hidebound; deaf to advice, impervious to reason; out of hand. Informal, cussed.

Phrases — a determined fellow can do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a lot of people can with a machine shop; if at first you don't succeed, try, try again; slow and steady wins the race; we shall overcome; quitters never win, winners never quit.

Quotations — I prefer an accommodating vice to an obstinate virtue (Molière), Perseverance, dear my lord, keeps honor bright (Shakespeare), Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good (Thomas Browne), She's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile (Richard Sheridan), Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again (Dorothy Fields), If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it (W. C. Fields).

Antonyms, see uncertainty, changeableness.

II

(Roget's IV) n.

Syn. stubbornness, tenacity, reluctance; see determination 2 , purpose 1 .

III

(Roget's Thesaurus II) noun 1. The quality or state of being stubbornly unyielding: bullheadedness, doggedness, hard-headedness, mulishness, obstinateness, pertina-ciousness, pertinacity, perverseness, perversity, pigheadedness, tenaciousness, tenacity, willfulness. See RESIST. 2. The quality or condition of being unruly: disorderliness, fractiousness, indocility, intractability, intractableness, obstinateness, obstreperousness, recalcitrance, recalcitrancy, refractoriness, uncontrollability, uncontrollableness, ungovernableness, unmanageability, unruliness, untowardness, wildness. See CONTROL, ORDER, PEACE, RESIST.