Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A performer who pretends to swallow fire.
- noun A belligerent person or a militant partisan.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A juggler who pretends to eat fire.
- noun A person of recklessly defiant disposition, especially a persistent duelist; specifically, in the United States, before the civil war, a violent and bitter Southern partizan.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
performer whopretends toswallow fire. - noun figuratively A
quarrelsome orbelligerent person. - noun US, historical An extreme partisan for the South before the US Civil War.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a member of a fire department who tries to extinguish fires
- noun a performer who pretends to swallow fire
- noun a belligerent grouch
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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I guess tomorrow night I'll pretend to be a snake charmer or a fire-eater, maybe the girl who rides the ponies backwards.
Tightrope Emily Smith-Miller 2011
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An amazing, inspiring and amusing man of 53 who had begun performing as a teenage accordianist, fire-eater and stilt-walker in a Quebec park in 1983, joined with some twenty acrobatic friends to create a unique assemblage of street artists who first came to Los Angeles next year for a show, not even knowing if they had the fare to return home.
Jay Weston: Cirque du Soleil's Ovo Drove Me Buggy... In a Nice Way Jay Weston 2012
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I guess tomorrow night I'll pretend to be a snake charmer or a fire-eater, maybe the girl who rides the ponies backwards.
Tightrope Emily Smith-Miller 2011
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Not at all the fire-eater he has turned out to be lately.
"Power" by Harl Vincent, part 7 Johnny Pez 2010
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The red sauce is very hot, so use less if your tongue is tender, more if you are a fire-eater.
One Big Table Molly O’Neill 2010
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The "gallant failure" had been the biggest botch since the Kabul Retreat, thanks to the idiot Maximilian, who was damned if he'd be rescued, so there, and I'd come off by the skin of my chattering teeth and the good offices of that gorgeous little fire-eater, Princess Aggie Salm-Salm, and Jesus Montero's gang of unwashed bandits who were on hand only because Jesus thought I knew where Montezuma's treasure was cached, more fool he.
Watershed 2010
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China had given him the misguided notion that I was the devil's own fire-eater, and just the chap to have on hand when Fuzzy charged the square.
Watershed 2010
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Less iconographically complex, though more symbolically resonant are her more recent large paintings of a female fire-eater in harlequin costume.
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Laliberte, an experienced fire-eater and stilt-walker who founded Cirque du Soleil, joined Russian cosmonaut Maxim Surayev and American astronaut Jeffrey Williams aboard a Soyuz craft that soared off the Kazakh steppe and set a course for the International Space Station.
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There are many moderate Republicans in Pennsylvania, probably not enough for Specter to have won his primary next year against fire-eater Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth, but certainly enough to have had a chance of victory and to have made a decent showing.
Bruce Ledewitz: Arlen Specter: The Pennsylvania Perspective 2009
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