BOMBAST • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • 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

... of the Holy Roman Empire still dragging from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old man, crowded in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom his fathers defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his bombast, is only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band, the All Highest himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver helmet, shows the slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner bravo. And the cry "God with us," which once rallied ...

— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... State letters, one is struck with the diplomatically(?) cunning composition of them. There does not seem to be a manly phrase from beginning to end. Trickery, suspicion, cruelty, veiled or apparent, and an occasional dash of pious consideration and bombast sums up these perfidious documents. A few extracts will convey precisely the character of the men who were carrying on negotiations which should have been regarded ...

— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... avowed that to-day, he should 'carry off Miss Sybil Lamotte, in spite of her high and mighty family, and in the face of all the town.' Of course, no one who heard regarded these things, save as the bombast of a half drunken braggart and liar. To-day, young Evarts and his still wilder chum, encountered him just setting forth with his fine turnout and wonderfully gotten up. They jested on his fine appearance, and for once he evaded their questions, and seemed anxious to be rid of them. This ...

— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never veiled his scorn of those—Shakespeare among them—whom he conceived ...

— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... from the Temple, his morals do show; But where his deep law is, few mortals yet know: His rhetoric, bombast, silly jests, are by far More like to lampooning, than pleading at bar. Knock ...

— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

More quotes...