- 1勇敢的、有勇氣的（比 brave 正式，偏道德上的勇氣）
Brave — willing to do something even though it you.
Brave and courageous mean the same thing, but they don't feel the same, and that difference is worth having. Brave is the everyday word, and it works for anything: a brave dog, a brave little boy at the dentist. Courageous is heavier and more formal, and it usually attaches to something that took a decision — someone thought about the danger, understood it, and went ahead anyway. So a soldier running into fire is brave; a person who reports her own company for cheating is courageous. It's the word for moral bravery especially, the kind where you lose something by being right.
Because it's the weightier word, it turns up in awards, speeches, , and news writing. In casual conversation, brave is what people actually say.
One more thing: English speakers often use courageous slightly ironically to mean "risky and probably ." "That's a courageous decision" said in a flat voice means "you're going to regret that." Listen to the tone.
The noun is courage, the adverb courageously.
From the word’s history
From Middle English corajous, from Old French corageus, corage + -eus.
源自古法文 corageus，就是 corage「勇氣」加上 -eus。
組成courage + -ous ("full of"). Courage came through French from Latin cor, "heart" — so at bottom it means "full of heart." That's not just a nice image: for a long time English used the heart, not the head, as the seat of the will.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
courageousadj/kəˈɹeɪd͡ʒəs/
- 1
Of a person, displaying or possessing courage.
- the most courageous person I have ever met
- In 1979, following Jimmy Carter’s unexpected and unreasonable decision to transfer diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, the Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act to preserve our relationship with this courageous nation. We believed that it was vital for our allies and for those who were not our allies to know that the United States would not abandon its friends.
- 2
Of an action, that requires courage.
- a courageous deed
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。