WORD OF THE DAY
To bloviate is to talk, but not just to chat. To bloviate means to go on and on and on and on, usually in a pompous way.
Can you hear the blow in the word bloviate? That's a clue that someone bloviating is blowing some serious hot air. When someone bloviates, he is speaking in an empty, pretentious, full-of-himself manner. This word is often associated with politicians, who probably invented bloviating. When someone is talking a lot and saying a little, they're bloviating.
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Vocabulary lists containing bloviate
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Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus. He is language columnist for The Boston Globe and the former "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. We asked Ben, as an expert on the history of American English, to give us some of his favorite words that originated in the United States. "I'm fascinated by how the English language developed a unique American flavor (not flavour!) beginning in colonial times. I've been collecting examples of great contributions from American English. Here is a cornucopia of copacetic coinages from fertile American minds."
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