Defiant | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

To Arms wordsmiths! This video is about the word defiant.

Defiant—it's an adjective. This word means openly disobeying rules, pushing back against authority. This word comes to us from French and ultimately Latin—a late Latin verb disfidare, which means to renounce, to go back on one's faith. Fidus is Latin for faith or trust, and dis means not or away.

So with that in mind, what are some English words that you can think of that contain those elements dis or FID? You're probably wondering about D and D; those are different sounds, but they mean the exact same thing in Latin—they both mean not or away.

I'll give you 10 seconds to think, and then show you what I came up with. Here we go!

Here are some of mine: dislike, which means not liking something; fidelity, which is like faithfulness or loyalty; and confidence, which is like saying you trust yourself, you have faith in yourself.

Let's use it in a sentence or two. In fact, let me show you a couple of forms of this word because you can use it as a verb, as defy or defies, as in "Luella defied her father and snuck out at night."

And then, when we turn it back into an adjective by adding that ant ending, we get defiant. Again, Plumaria Goodart was defiant; she would never give in to Lady Morant.

Little hoby woman over here brimming with goodness, big evil sorceress over here crackling with lightning—feel my wrath! I'll never join you, etc., etc. You get the picture.

To be defiant is to be bold, audacious, rebellious, unruly. A defiant person openly flouts rules and fights authority.

So when you want to turn that adjective defiant into a noun, you turn the ant into an ance. Defiant becomes defiance. That's how you talk about it as a noun.

Let me use it in a sentence: "The rebels showed their defiance through performances of forbidden dance."

The most forbidden dance of all is the dance of neurons blazing through your mind as they make new connections—sparks flying in the deepness of your mind as your brain becomes a bright, shimmering beacon of knowledge.

The Roomba of rumination, the Bachata of brilliance, the Lambada of learning—you can learn anything.

David out!