radical.

1. Thorough or fundamental, going far beyond a small change or a conventional approach.

2. Favoring sweeping social or political change, or extreme measures to reshape or restore an established order.

3. Someone who supports sweeping social or political change, or extreme measures to reshape or restore an established order.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• radical change
• a radical departure
• a radical rethinking

On the page

The findings require a radical rethinking of how the condition is understood.

Rather than repair individual rules, she proposed a radical redesign of the institution.

The movement’s radical program challenged the ownership of land rather than merely the level of rents.

Her radical politics placed her outside the compromise accepted by the party leadership.

The committee included cautious reformers as well as radicals who wanted to replace the whole system.

Usage notes

Adjective: more radical, most radical are natural where degrees of change or political position are compared. Countable person noun: radical, radicals. Technical nouns also take radicals. No verb forms are assigned. Pronunciation: /ˈræd.ɪ.kəl/ — RAD-ih-kuhl. Register: neutral. Commonness: common in general and political English; technical and slang meanings context-specific (dictionary-informed qualitative editorial estimate; not a measured frequency).