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/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."

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Etymology of 'Bombast'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Bombast" Quotes from Famous Books

... what constitutes its excellence. From the nature of the language, all French poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all that keeps out decay. The length of their dramatic verse forces the French into much tautology, into bombast in its original meaning, the stuffing out a thought with words till it fills the line. The rigid system of their rhyme, which makes it much harder to manage than in English, has accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would shock ...

— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... phase of the situation was taken up and discussed with thoroughness characteristic of these leaders of men, with thoroughness, too, that showed full familiarity with all the conditions of commercialized vice in Chicago. The evasions and bombast wherewith these citizens were accustomed to adorn their public addresses before vice commission inquiries were strangely lacking. They spoke among themselves ...

— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks

... lost.] Vices of Style opposed to the Sublime: Affectation, Bombast, False Sentiment, Frigid Conceits. ...

— On the Sublime • Longinus

... his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the Decline and Fall of the ...

— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... the alchemists was he who is generally known as Paracelsus. He was born about 1493, and died about 1540. It is probable that the place of his birth was Einsiedeln, near Zurich. He claimed relationship with the noble family of Bombast von Hohenheim; but some of his biographers doubt whether he really was connected with that family. His name, or at any rate the name by which he was known, was Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. His father in alchemy, ...

— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir

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