Word Finder - fanatical

definition

Having an extreme, irrational zeal or enthusiasm for a specific cause.

He's fanatical about all of Quinn's equipment too.

On several occasions he defended the cause of moderation and justice against the fanatical crusaders, but he never had the energy to make it prevail.

It sounds a bit fanatical, doesn't it?

Difficulty arose between the governor of Bahia and this fanatical missionary, with the result that Conselheiro was ordered to leave the settlement and take away his people.

It is the same spirit that makes people fanatical about a certain sports team, regardless of the players or the score.

Cheribon has been for many centuries the centre of Islamism in western Java, and is also the seat of a fanatical Mahommedan sect controlled from Mecca.

His moderation and piety held in check the turbulence of the more fanatical amongst them.

By some considered as a fanatical devotee, and by others as given up to mysticism, he is generally described as kind and gentle in disposition, and devoted to the interests of his country.

Those contiguous Afghan tribes, who have not so long ago been converted to the faith of Islam, are naturally the most fanatical and the most virulent upholders of the faith around them.

It was revised and kept alive by Jeremy Bentham in his fanatical scheme for a "panopticon or inspection house," described as "a circular building, an iron cage glazed, a glass lantern as large as Ranelagh, with the cells on the outer circumference."

But the fanatical preachers of the League clamoured furiously for vengeance, and on the 1st of August 1589, while Henry III.

Shortly after the accession of Cyril to the patriarchate of Alexandria in 412, owing to her intimacy with Orestes, the pagan prefect of the city, Hypatia was barbarously murdered by the Nitrian monks and the fanatical Christian mob (March 415).

Both before and after that year, however, the Bareilly Mahommedans have distinguished themselves by fanatical tumults against the Hindus.

Thenceforwards the name of Jacobin was confined to the smaller and more fanatical group, while the rest came to be known as the Girondins.

In the districts east of Farah are to be found the most fanatical of the Durani Afghan tribes.

Zwingli, who details these articles, as he says, that the world may see that they are "fanatical, stolid, audacious, impious," can scarcely be acquitted of unfairness in joining together two of them, - the fourth and fifth, - thus making the article treat "of the avoiding of abominable pastors in the church" (Super devitatione abominabilium pastorum in Ecclesia), though there is nothing about pastors in the fourth article, and nothing about abominations in the fifth, and though in a marginal note he himself explains that the first two copies that were sent him read as he does, but the other copies make two articles, as in fact they evidently are.

While negotiations were still pending, he had been set upon one evening by a fanatical ruffian, who thought to expedite matters with the dagger.

Though good-hearted he was weak and licentious; and once out of the hands of the fanatical party he became ensnared by women and entangled in harem intrigues.

He hated lecturing, and was bored with the importunities of the fanatical preachers; and in 1574 he returned to France, and made his home for the next twenty years with Chastaigner.

Until the king came of age (1568), his grandmother, Queen Catherine, a fanatical daughter of Isabella the Catholic, and his great-uncle, Prince Henry, cardinal and inquisitor-general, governed as joint regents.

Ferdinand was known as a fanatical adherent of the Church of Rome and as a cruel persecutor of the Protestants of Styria.

It appeared to them more advantageous to encounter the weak Matthias than his younger and more fanatical successor.

In 1699 the Arab or fanatical party suppressed female government, and put a chief of Arab blood on the throne.

Schmiedel asks, " How should Paul ever come to be in the 2nd, or, as far as the pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions are concerned, even in the 3rd or 4th century, the object of so fanatical a hatred?

Here he resumed his crusade against Mahommedanism, raised the fanatical spirit of the inhabitants, was stoned outside the city walls and died of his wounds on the 29th of June 1315.

She undoubtedly nerved the French at a critical time, and inspired an army of laggards and pillagers with a fanatical enthusiasm, comparable with that of Cromwell's Puritans.

For the Lollards were hardened by persecution, and became fanatical in the statement of their doctrines.

This lady was a fanatical pagan of a disquieting strength of character.

The Anabaptists of Germany had spread into France, and were disseminating many wild and fanatical opinions among those who had seceded from the Church of Rome.

But this mission helped to make him an object of suspicion to the other members of the Committee of Public Safety, and especially to Robespierre, who as a deist and a fanatical follower of the ideas of Rousseau, hated Herault, the follower of the naturalism of Diderot.

The Hungarian government left much liberty to the Croatian nobles, a turbulent and fanatical class, ever ready for civil war, rebellion or a campaign against the Bosnian heretics.

Whilst the native Spaniards were narrowing the limits of the Moorish kingdoms, and whilst the generally fanatical dynasty of the Almohades might have been expected to repress speculation, the century preceding the close of Mahommedan sway saw philosophy cultivated by Avempace, Abubacer and Averroes.

Mensurius had held moderate views as to the treatment of the traditores, and accordingly a strong fanatical party had formed itself in Carthage in opposition to him, headed by a wealthy and influential widow named Lucilla, and countenanced by Secundus of Tigisis, episcopus primae sedis in Numidia.

It was not, however, until the commencement of the 5th century that the sect began to decline, owing largely to the rise among them of a group of moderate and scholarly men like the grammarian Tychonius, who vainly strove to overcome the more fanatical section.

The Arab, though he produced Mahommedanism, was the least fanatical of the followers of the Prophet, Character of and was not only willing but desirous to leave to all Arab Rule.

In a country noted for its fanatical loyalty to the Crown and the Church, the kingship was to be deprived of all power and influence, and the clergy to be excluded as such from Spanish all share in legislation.

His incalculableness, his savage cruelty (like most of the princes of his house he was a fanatical Catholic and persecutor) and his perpetual restlessness point plainly enough to a disordered mind.

However, the Germans faced an almost fanatical enemy, willing to defend at all costs.

The range was immense - a reflection of the passionate, even fanatical, interest of the Hillier family in hardy plants.

Is Tony Blair so fanatical as not to listen to their voice?

Jed, pitted against a religiously fanatical backdrop appears two dimensional.

Several other equally fanatical insurrections had to be put down by military force.

I kind of thought it would be like that - the Spaniards seem well fanatical.

Because they're not allowed to travel into the West it becomes an almost fanatical obsession to do it.

Indeed, they were considered its best grounds; and the lawyers defended them with fanatical zeal.

First he attempted to hold Vienna against the imperial troops, and, after the capitulation, hastened to Pressburg to offer his services to Kossuth, first defending himself, in a long memorial, from the accusations of treachery to the Polish cause and of aristocratic tendencies which the more fanatical section of the Polish emigrant Radicals repeatedly brought against him.

The nature of Cromwell's statesmanship is to be seen rather in his struggles against the retrograde influences and opinions of his time, in the many political reforms anticipated though not originated or established by himself, and in his religious, perhaps fanatical, enthusiasm, than in the outward character of his administration, which, however, in spite of its despotism shows itself in its inner spirit of justice, patriotism and self-sacrifice, so immeasurably superior to that of the Stuarts.

He found an ignorant and corrupt society ruled by an immoral yet fanatical monarch, who wasted millions on unprofitable buildings though the country was almost without roads and the people had become the most backward in Europe.

Something of the old enthusiasm seems to have passed to the inhabitants of Chorum, whom most travellers have found bigoted and fanatical Mahommedans (see J.G.C.Anderson, Studia Pontica, pp. 6 ff.).

Although Chosroes had in the last years of his father extirpated the heretical and communistic Persian sect of the Mazdakites (see Kavadh) and was a sincere adherent of Zoroastrian orthodoxy, he was not fanatical or prone to persecution.