boast.
A brag; ostentatious positive appraisal of oneself.
Meaning & usage
A brag; ostentatious positive appraisal of oneself.
Something that one brags about.
It was his regular boast that he could eat two full English breakfasts in one sitting.
A shot where the ball is driven off a side wall and then strikes the front wall.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English bosten, from bost (“boast, glory, noise, arrogance, presumption, pride, vanity”), probably of North Germanic origin, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *bausuz (“inflated, swollen, puffed up, proud, arrogant, bad”). Cognate with Scots bost, boist (“to threaten, brag, boast”), Anglo-Norman bost (“ostentation”) (from Germanic). Related to Norwegian baus (“proud, bold, daring”), dialectal German baustern (“to swell”), German böse (“evil, bad, angry”), Dutch boos (“evil, wicked, angry”), West Frisian boas (“bad, wicked, angry, shrewd, clever”). Compare also dialectal Norwegian bausta, busta (“to rush onward, make a noise”). Possible doublet of boost. Compare typologically puffy, Russian напы́щенный (napýščennyj), наду́тый (nadútyj).
To brag; to talk loudly in praise of oneself.
[with about or of] To speak of with pride, vanity, or exultation, with a view to self-commendation; to extol.
To speak in exulting language of another; to glory; to exult.
To play a boast shot.
To possess (a special and desirable quality).
The hotel boasts one of the best views of the sea.
His family boasted a famous name.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English bosten, from bost (“boast, glory, noise, arrogance, presumption, pride, vanity”), probably of North Germanic origin, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *bausuz (“inflated, swollen, puffed up, proud, arrogant, bad”). Cognate with Scots bost, boist (“to threaten, brag, boast”), Anglo-Norman bost (“ostentation”) (from Germanic). Related to Norwegian baus (“proud, bold, daring”), dialectal German baustern (“to swell”), German böse (“evil, bad, angry”), Dutch boos (“evil, wicked, angry”), West Frisian boas (“bad, wicked, angry, shrewd, clever”). Compare also dialectal Norwegian bausta, busta (“to rush onward, make a noise”). Possible doublet of boost. Compare typologically puffy, Russian напы́щенный (napýščennyj), наду́тый (nadútyj).
To dress, as a stone, with a broad chisel.
To shape roughly as a preparation for the finer work to follow; to cut to the general form required.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.