centauresque

English

centauresque (comparative more centauresque, superlative most centauresque)

Having attributes like those of the mythical centaur.
- 2011, Gérard Gavarry, Jane Kuntz, Making a Novel, page 60:
  More distrustful and irritable than ever, in this section, this watchdog character was to be obsessed with the centauresque likeness of my four boys.
- 1911, "The Centaurs", The Nation: Volume 92, page 212:
  Here they take on their true centauresque form, each one mounting a hired courser and clattering through the town in the direction of the Wood of Verrières.
By extension, having the characteristics of two things combined together; hybridized; chimeric.
- 2007, Patricia Kathleen Page, Zailig Pollock, The Filled Pen: Selected Non-fiction, page 68:
  Message and method merge, centauresque, to assist him.
- 1993, Albert Russell Ascoli, Victoria Ann Kahn, Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, page 252:
  Machiavelli begins chapter 26 by asking if the times are right for a "new prince" in Italy, one "prudente e virtuoso," like Borgia, like the profeta armato, like the hybrid centauresque monster to be composed of Machiavelli's counsel and Medicean power.
- 1863, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Greek Christian poets and the English poets, page 160:
  We are of opinion in any way, that the grace is more obvious than the strength ; and there may be something centauresque and of twofold nature in their rushing mutabilities, and changes on passion and weakness.

centauresque (plural centauresques)