Word of the Day

: March 24, 2019

magniloquent

adjective mag-NIL-uh-kwunt

What It Means

: speaking in or characterized by a high-flown often bombastic style or manner

magniloquent in Context

The magniloquent sportscaster sometimes got so carried away with his monologues that he would forget to describe the action on the field.

"It [the television series Billions] features two outsize, magniloquent protagonists who are constant foils to one another: light and dark, good and evil, both cut from the same ambitious cloth and therefore destined to lock in an endless pas de deux of power." — Rachel Syme, The New Republic, 1 May 2018

Did You Know?

Magnus means "great" in Latin; loqui is a Latin verb meaning "to speak." Combine the two and you get magniloquus, the Latin predecessor of magniloquent. English-speakers started using magniloquent in the 1600s—even though we have had its synonym grandiloquent since the 1500s. (Grandiloquent comes from Latin grandiloquus, which combines loqui and grandis, another word for "great" in Latin.) Today, these synonyms continue to exist side by side and to be used interchangeably, though grandiloquent is the more common of the two.