bluster

verb blus·ter \ ˈblə-stər \

Updated on: 19 May 2018

Definition of bluster

blustered; blustering play \ˈblə-st(ə-)riŋ\

intransitive verb

1 : to talk or act with noisy swaggering threats

brags and blusters but rarely does what he says he'll do

2 a : to blow in stormy noisy gusts

a cold, blustering wind

b : to be windy and boisterous

… when autumn blusters and the orchard rocks.
—Robert Browning

transitive verb

1 : to utter with noisy self-assertiveness

"I don't want to hear it!" he blustered.

2 : to drive or force by blustering

… trying to bluster us into the belief that they are much better than they look.
—F. A. Swinnerton

—

blusterer

play \-tər-ər\ noun

See bluster defined for English-language learners

See bluster defined for kids

Examples of bluster in a Sentence

He brags and blusters, but he never really does what he says he'll do.
“I don't want to hear it!” he blustered.
The wind blustered through the valley.

Recent Examples of bluster from the Web

During the same period, my stepmother got breast cancer, my mother-in-law had brain surgery, and Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un blustered on about nuclear war.

— jake halpern, WSJ, "Drip, Drip: Why We Sweat the Small Stuff," 17 Apr. 2018
During the kids' first week back in school, a late-summer wind blustered up.

— logan ward, Popular Mechanics, "How to Build a Treehouse in the Backyard," 20 Mar. 2017
In another post, Mira Rapp-Hooper looked at five takeaways from Trump’s blustering rhetoric on North Korea.

— elizabeth n. saunders, Washington Post, "Five things Trump did on his summer vacation: A foreign policy roundup," 4 Sep. 2017
While candidate Trump blustered about scrapping the nuclear deal altogether, his administration has been compelled to shy away from such drastic unilateral action.

— ishaan tharoor, Washington Post, "The U.S. and Iran are heading toward crisis," 19 July 2017
As Dexter Filkins recently wrote, in , some officials fear that Trump will bluster about terrorism in public but privately delegate strategy to the military.

— david rohde, The New Yorker, "What Donald Trump Can Do to Help Stop Terrorism: Talk Less," 4 June 2017
But this long work gets bogged down with heavy-handed comedic episodes that last too long, mostly involving the crude, blustering Baron Ochs, a cousin of the Marschallin.

— anthony tommasini, New York Times, "Review: Renée Fleming’s Poignant Farewell to ‘Der Rosenkavalier’," 14 Apr. 2017
But at the end of the day, what Trump blusters about doesn't matter, at least this time—what matters is the Senate's actions that could hurt millions of Americans.

— megan friedman, Esquire, "Seth Meyers Breaks Down the 'Cartoonishly Evil' Trumpcare Bill," 27 June 2017
Despite intense backlash from customers and advocates, several federal investigations, and blustering lawmakers, the company has yet to drop the soaring price of its epinephrine auto-injectors, EpiPen, as The New York Times pointed out this weekend.

— beth mole, Ars Technica, "Mylan chairman: Drug pricing critics ought to go copulate with themselves," 5 June 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'bluster.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.