Dictionary

bumptious en · ADJ

Pronunciation

• /ˈbʌmpʃəs/
• (Southern-England) audio

Etymology

Probably from bump, on the pattern of words like fractious or presumptious.

Meanings

1. (UK) Obtrusively pushy; self-important; self-assertive to a pretentious extreme.
   • From another point of view, it was a place without a soul. The well-to-do had hearts of stone; the rich were brutally bumptious; the Press, the Municipality, all the public men, were ridiculously, vaingloriously self-satisfied. 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XXII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
   • [… 1887, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet”, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, London; New York, N.Y.: Ward, Lock & Co., part I (Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., […]), chapter II (The Science of Deduction), page 14:
   • No doubt of it, Edmund was at grips with that bumptious little hairy dog. They were going it at the very top note of sadistic fury, screaming and snip-snapping in such a lightning mixture of black and white murder that the eye could not follow it. 1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 140:
   • She could stand it no longer. It was full of prying old women, she said, who stared in one's face, and of bumptious young men who trod on one's toes. 1928, Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, London: The Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished as Orlando: A Biography (eBook no. 0200331h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, July 2015:

Forms

Deriveds

unbumptious · bumptiousness · bumptiously · overbumptious

Translations (13)

de prätentiös (obtrusively pushy) · de wichtigtuerisch (obtrusively pushy) · de selbsteingenommen (obtrusively pushy) · ga stráisiúnta (obtrusively pushy) · de anmaßend (obtrusively pushy) · bg надменен (obtrusively pushy) · ga smugach (obtrusively pushy) · de aufgeblasen (obtrusively pushy) · nl hanerig (obtrusively pushy) · ga tollmhór (obtrusively pushy) · bg самоуверен (obtrusively pushy) · nl zelfgenoegzaam (obtrusively pushy) · de überkandidelt (obtrusively pushy)