Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
- Originally, cotton, or cotton wool.
- a candle with a wick of bombast
- Cotton, or any soft, fibrous material, used as stuffing for garments; stuffing; padding.
- How now, my sweet creature of bombast!
- doublets, stuffed with four, five, or six pounds of bombast at least
- (figuratively) High-sounding words; a pompous or ostentatious manner of writing or speaking; language above the dignity of the occasion.
- Yet noisy bombast carefully avoid.
1898, William Graham Sumner, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, in War and Other Essays, Yale, published 1911, page 331:
- Upon a little serious examination the off-hand disposal of an important question of policy by the declaration that Americans can do anything proves to be only a silly piece of bombast.
- (cotton or cotton wool): fustian
- (high-sounding words): bombard phrase (obs.), fustian, grandiloquence
- To swell or fill out; to pad; to inflate.
1839, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4.:
- Ib. Their doctrine is to be seen in Jacob Behmen's books by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms.
- 2013, Christianna Brand, What Dread Hand?: A Collection of Short Stories
- The ugly truth is, Gerald,' she said viciously, 'that you're a phoney, a rotten, bombasting phoney, trying to cover up from all the world, […]