Vainest

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Exhibiting the greatest level of excessive pride in one's appearance or qualities
2. Displaying the most extreme sense of self-admiration or conceit imaginable
3. Possessing the utmost amount of vanity, often marked by an overestimation of one's own worth

Etymology: "Vainest" is the superlative of "vain," so its story is really the story of the root word. In Latin, "vanus" meant "empty," and it carried that sense of hollowness into Old French as "vain," meaning worthless or fruitless. English took the word through Middle English as "veyn," and for centuries it described things that came to nothing, such as vain attempts or vain hopes, before it came to describe a person whose emptiness showed up as excessive self-regard. The shift from "empty" to "self-admiring" is the surprising part. A vain person was once someone whose efforts or pride had no substance behind them, and the sense of conceit grew out of that idea of hollow display. The superlative "vainest" therefore names the person most full of this empty self-regard.

Synonyms: most conceited, most arrogant

Antonyms: humble, modest