Hobbes

H4O1B3B3E1S1
UK/hɒbz/US/hɑbz/

proper noun

A surname originating as a patronymic.

Less commonScrabble 13

Meanings

proper nounHobbes (plural Hobbeses)

plural Hobbeses

  1. A surname originating as a patronymic.
    1. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), English philosopher.

      Masters and men, according to Mr. Thornton, fatally confront each other in something like Hobbes’s misanthropically imagined state of nature, with nothing but force, or the fear of force in the background […]

      1871, “Economic Fallacies and Labour Utopias”, in The Quarterly Review, volume 131, number 261, page 244
      2 more examples

      The ideological gap between figures like Boehner and antagonists like Ted Cruz is not completely nonexistent; a world in which Boehner had unfettered power would have a radically smaller government, while a Cruz-topia would look more like Hobbes’s state of nature.

      2015 October 9, Jonathan Chait, “Why Republicans Need Paul Ryan As House Speaker”, in New York

      […] Wengrow and Graeber argue that the life of hunter-gatherers before widespread farming was nothing like “the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory,” which hold that early humans lived in small bands in which they acted almost entirely on instinct, either brutish (as in Hobbes) or egalitarian and innocent (as in Rousseau).

      2022 July 11, Virginia Hefferman, “Humans Have Always Been Wrong About Humans”, in Wired

Origin

From a medieval diminutive form of the given name Robert + the patronymic suffix -s.

Full word history & related roots →

Translations

Chinese Mandarin 霍布斯
  • 霍布斯 (Huòbùsī)surname
Latin Hobbius
  • Hobbiussurname
Russian Гоббс
  • Гоббс (Gobbs)surname

Rhymes & wordplay

Rhymes with Hobbes

All rhymes →
Cite this entry
APA

Hobbes. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Hobbes

MLA

“Hobbes.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Hobbes. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Hobbes,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Hobbes.

Source: Hobbes on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.