• Today's Word

Vaunt

🔊 Listen to the word Vaunt

VAWNT

Definition

(verb/noun)  To boast about or praise something excessively, especially one’s own achievements or qualities.

Example

The company’s much-vaunted innovation strategy had produced exactly one product in three years — a fact the press release somehow failed to mention.

Word Origin

Vaunt derives from the Old French vanter, meaning “to boast,” from the Late Latin vanitare — from vanus, meaning “empty” or “vain.” The same root gives us vanity, vain, and vanish — all words built around emptiness or the illusion of substance. It entered English in the 15th century, used to describe the kind of boasting that draws attention to itself precisely because what lies beneath it cannot support the weight of the claim being made.

 

Fun Fact

The most celebrated vaunter in English literature is almost certainly Sir John Falstaff — Shakespeare’s magnificently self-aggrandizing knight whose vaunting bears no relationship whatsoever to his actual military record. In Henry IV Part 1, Falstaff claims to have fought off eleven men in buckram single-handedly, a number that grows with each telling until Prince Hal quietly deflates the entire account. Shakespeare used Falstaff’s vaunting to make a precise point about the relationship between self-promotion and reality — that the volume of a boast is often inversely proportional to the substance behind it, a principle that has lost none of its relevance in the six centuries since.