"reluctant dragon" meaning in English

See reluctant dragon in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: reluctant dragons [plural]
Etymology: In reference to The Reluctant Dragon, an 1898 children's story by Kenneth Grahame about a shy dragon with no desire to fight people, adapted into a Walt Disney animated film in 1941. Head templates: {{en-noun}} reluctant dragon (plural reluctant dragons)
  1. (colloquial) A reluctant person; somebody unwilling to get involved. Wikipedia link: The Reluctant Dragon Tags: colloquial Categories (topical): Human behaviour, People, Personality
    Sense id: en-reluctant_dragon-en-noun-YW7~8hjY Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries

Inflected forms

{
  "etymology_text": "In reference to The Reluctant Dragon, an 1898 children's story by Kenneth Grahame about a shy dragon with no desire to fight people, adapted into a Walt Disney animated film in 1941.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "reluctant dragons",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "reluctant dragon (plural reluctant dragons)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with 1 entry",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with entries",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Human behaviour",
          "orig": "en:Human behaviour",
          "parents": [
            "Human",
            "All topics",
            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "People",
          "orig": "en:People",
          "parents": [
            "Human",
            "All topics",
            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Personality",
          "orig": "en:Personality",
          "parents": [
            "Mind",
            "Human",
            "All topics",
            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1979, A History of Cancer Control in the United States, 1946-1971:",
          "text": "ENDICOTT: I think probably one of the promotive things we did was to finally convince Luther Terry that he had to do something about smoking and health. He certainly was a reluctant dragon, for a long time.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1990, Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television:",
          "text": "[…] Dodd seemed a “reluctant dragon.” No report on his violence probe was ever published. An interim report was mimeographed in a watered-down version for subcommittee members, but never released to the public.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007, Alan Farrell, High Cheekbones, Pouty Lips, Tight Jeans, page 311:",
          "text": "Cage, a barrel-chested, tattooed (and how!) loner, finds himself dragooned into national service, a reluctant dragon, selected after a series of bizarre “tests” and then infiltrated into Prague […]",
          "type": "quote"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A reluctant person; somebody unwilling to get involved."
      ],
      "id": "en-reluctant_dragon-en-noun-YW7~8hjY",
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(colloquial) A reluctant person; somebody unwilling to get involved."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "colloquial"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "The Reluctant Dragon"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "reluctant dragon"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "In reference to The Reluctant Dragon, an 1898 children's story by Kenneth Grahame about a shy dragon with no desire to fight people, adapted into a Walt Disney animated film in 1941.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "reluctant dragons",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "reluctant dragon (plural reluctant dragons)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English colloquialisms",
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms derived from fiction",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Pages with 1 entry",
        "Pages with entries",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned",
        "en:Human behaviour",
        "en:People",
        "en:Personality"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1979, A History of Cancer Control in the United States, 1946-1971:",
          "text": "ENDICOTT: I think probably one of the promotive things we did was to finally convince Luther Terry that he had to do something about smoking and health. He certainly was a reluctant dragon, for a long time.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1990, Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television:",
          "text": "[…] Dodd seemed a “reluctant dragon.” No report on his violence probe was ever published. An interim report was mimeographed in a watered-down version for subcommittee members, but never released to the public.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007, Alan Farrell, High Cheekbones, Pouty Lips, Tight Jeans, page 311:",
          "text": "Cage, a barrel-chested, tattooed (and how!) loner, finds himself dragooned into national service, a reluctant dragon, selected after a series of bizarre “tests” and then infiltrated into Prague […]",
          "type": "quote"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A reluctant person; somebody unwilling to get involved."
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(colloquial) A reluctant person; somebody unwilling to get involved."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "colloquial"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "The Reluctant Dragon"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "reluctant dragon"
}

Download raw JSONL data for reluctant dragon meaning in English (2.0kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-03-23 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-03-21 using wiktextract (fef8596 and 633533e). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.