Braggadocio

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /bɹaɡaˈdoːt͡ʃo/

Definitions

  1. Boastful and exaggerated talk or behavior intended to impress others, often lacking substance or truth behind the claims
  2. Loud and self-aggrandizing speech marked by empty boasts and inflated claims designed to win admiration through exaggeration
  3. Arrogant and ostentatious language characterized by grandiose assertions that exceed one's actual accomplishments or abilities

Etymology: For centuries English speakers have mocked swaggering boasters with a word that sounds Italian but that no Italian ever used. It was invented by an English poet, who built it from a plain English verb and then dressed it in an Italian costume. The poet was Edmund Spenser, and the costume belonged to Braggadocchio, a character in "The Faerie Queene," whose first three books appeared in 1590. Spenser took "brag," an English word of uncertain origin in use since the Middle Ages, and gave it an ending that sounded Italian. In Elizabethan England, Italy stood for fashion, flourish and a certain showy courtliness, so the result sounded like a man too pleased with his own plumage. He earns the name. In Book II he steals the knight Guyon's horse, arms himself with borrowed confidence and picks up a sly squire named Trompart, who flatters him shamelessly. When the huntress Belphoebe comes crashing through the woods, this would-be hero hides in a bush. His reckoning comes in Book V, published in 1596, at a wedding tournament where he tries to claim another knight's victory. He is exposed, Guyon reclaims his horse, and the iron man Talus shaves off his beard and breaks his sword. The boaster is stripped of every prop he ever bragged with. The name escaped the poem within a few years. "Braggadocio" came to mean any braggart, and the doubled consonant slimmed down along the way. The meaning then drifted from the man to his talk. By the 1700s the word meant empty boasting itself, the bluster rather than the blusterer. A comic coward from an Elizabethan allegory had become a common noun, and the fake Italian ending still makes the boast sound a size too big.

Synonyms: boasting, vainglory

Antonyms: humility, modesty