adjective

• Showing or suffering from nervousness or a lack of confidence.

  ‘a timorous voice’

  More example sentences

  • ‘There is still a strong impression that the party's political approach remains timorous and lacks creativity when it comes to figuring out new responses to old problems.’
  • ‘Girls, allegedly timorous and lacking in confidence, now outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and in debating clubs.’
  • ‘Eileen wants a man with ‘a nice face, kind eyes and a gentle voice,’ but can only break out of her meek and timorous shell in her fantasies.’
  • ‘In terms of modern PC attitudes toward war and national solidarity, it's a big bucket of cold water down the pants of the timorous, and it reminds you how unapologetic popular patriotism used to be.’
  • ‘Some are behemoths in the truest sense of the word, massive as oil tankers, others, small knock-kneed and timorous and as prone to panic attacks as barking deer.’
  • ‘I still cannot quite believe that this cowering timorous country of ours has produced such an extravagant masterpiece, and it has achieved something that not many modern buildings do - it has won the affection of those who use it.’
  • ‘The best departments will encourage an entrepreneurship of information and ideas, which in turn requires daring, not conformity, and a cool-eyed rather than a timorous attitude to risk.’
  • ‘Man, these people are just too stupid to be trusted with appointments - and too timorous to deserve to a university position from which to dribble out the contents of their weak little minds.’
  • ‘But sadly it is all too typical of the dismissive attitude adopted by those at the Executive who seem to think that an airy-fairy, and probably timorous, arts lobby will go away if told that everything will be all right.’
  • ‘But the idea that a woman cannot be expected to cope with going into a witness box, where she will be publicly identified, is equally stereotypical: it implies a degraded notion of weak and timorous women.’
  • ‘At the moment, however, he is tackling arguably his most challenging subject, one which many lesser and more timorous artists would not dare contemplate for fear that it might ruin their fragile reputations.’
  • ‘They've swiped the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm - and as a result their rhetoric and critiques are timorous and toothless.’
  • ‘The Welshman, who had stepped away from Livingston's timorous back line, seemed almost to be in the prone position when he wheeled to thrash a low volley inside the left-hand post.’
  • ‘And we have become a surprisingly timorous nation because we don't ask our leaders, our politicians serious questions.’
  • ‘And deep in their tiny, timorous hearts they know it.’
  • ‘So there are enormous consequences for all of us when the owners elect not to act like owners, but like timorous lackeys desperate to please management.’
  • ‘Neil Gatland as Malvolio displays an austere exterior well suited to his bitter antagonism with Sir Toby and yet is very funny to watch when at last it cracks into a hopeful, timorous smile.’
  • ‘If it had been, a particularly vicious correction must have occurred to turn Britain back into the timorous, conservative country it became in the Seventies.’
  • ‘Even a timorous proposal to convert taxis from diesel to less-polluting petrol five years ago failed to win legislative support.’
  • ‘But the thinking behind it is consistent with the rather timorous, hands-off approach to recent conflicts.’

  Synonyms

  easily frightened, lacking courage, fearful, apprehensive, faint-hearted

  View synonyms