BOMBAST • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Bombast

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/bˈɑmbæst/ Listen

noun

Bombast n.

Originally, cotton, or cotton wool. (Obs.) "A candle with a wick of bombast."

Cotton, or any soft, fibrous material, used as stuffing for garments; stuffing; padding. (Obs.) "How now, my sweet creature of bombast!" "Doublets, stuffed with four, five, or six pounds of bombast at least."

Fig.: High-sounding words; an inflated style; language above the dignity of the occasion; fustian. "Yet noisy bombast carefully avoid."

verb

Bombast v. t. To swell or fill out; to pad; to inflate. (Obs.) "Not bombasted with words vain ticklish ears to feed."

adjective

Bombast adj. High-sounding; inflated; big without meaning; magniloquent; bombastic. "(He) evades them with a bombast circumstance, Horribly stuffed with epithets of war." "Nor a tall metaphor in bombast way."

See images of 'Bombast'

Etymology of 'Bombast'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Bombast" Quotes from Famous Books

... though the melancholy is too dreamy to deserve the name of passion, and the terror of the infinite is not explicitly connected with any religious emotion. It is a proof of the fineness of his taste, that he scarcely ever falls into bombast; we tremble at his audacity in accumulating gorgeous phrases; but we confess that he is justified by the result. The only exception that I can remember is the passage in 'The English Mailcoach,' where his exaggerated patriotism leads him into what strikes me at least as a rather vulgar bit of ...

— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... these periods in quiet, invincible scorn. Storri, beaten, frightened, began to whine. His bluster, his bombast, his nobility, his affected elevations, were alike broken down. He professed love; he said that he had wronged his San Reve. His San Reve was a goddess, a flower, a star! Would she make her Storri desolate?—her Storri who would die ...

— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... characters; and they were right. The characters had all been prepared for a different sort of man. Our tragedy hero was a round, robustious fellow, with an amazing voice; who stamped and slapped his breast until his wig shook again; and who roared and bellowed out his bombast, until every phrase swelled upon the ear like the sound of a kettle-drum. I might as well have attempted to fill out his clothes as his characters. When we had a dialogue together, I was nothing before him, ...

— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... improves the opportunities of these societies need not neglect his regular college work, but in them can train himself to think consecutively, and gain facility of expression and an acquaintance with parliamentary law. If he makes faithful preparation, he will escape bombast and loose thinking and expression, and will become familiar with public movements, political questions, and social tendencies. For these and other reasons the literary societies should be encouraged, and students should consider it a privilege to ...

— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker

... ones. He put forward in support of this view the distribution of death, wounds and decorations in this war. This theory of history has in it larger elements of wholesomeness and truth than has, for instance, the pernicious bombast of Carlyle. I told my Sardinian friend that I had once heard it said by a most learned man that, if Rousseau had never lived, the world would not look very different to-day, except that probably there would be no negro republic in ...

— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

More quotes...