Kurtzian

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Megalomaniac; brutal, tyrannical.

    "[…]imagine Caleb’s excitement and fear when he wins an in-house competition to spend a week alone with the firm’s reclusive, scarily Kurtzian founder, Nathan (bullishly played by Oscar Isaac), in his gigantic fortress of solitude on a private island—it looks like the one where they built Jurassic Park."

Example

More examples

"[…]imagine Caleb’s excitement and fear when he wins an in-house competition to spend a week alone with the firm’s reclusive, scarily Kurtzian founder, Nathan (bullishly played by Oscar Isaac), in his gigantic fortress of solitude on a private island—it looks like the one where they built Jurassic Park."

Etymology

From Kurtz + -ian, after the fictional character Kurtz in the novel Heart of Darkness.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.