Blatant

How to spell blatant

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce blatant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does blatant mean?

1. adjectiveDone openly and unashamedly, in a way that is glaringly obvious and offensive.

Blatant in a sentence

• The report exposed a blatant conflict of interest among the board members.

• Her excuse was a blatant lie that nobody in the office believed.

Where does blatant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is one of the rare English words with a known inventor: the poet Edmund Spenser coined it in his epic The Faerie Queene, published in 1596, where he wrote of the 'blatant beast', a thousand-tongued monster that personified slander and gossip. Spenser seems to have built the word on the Latin verb blatire, meaning 'to babble' or 'to prattle noisily', though some scholars suspect a link to Scots and dialect words like 'blatand', meaning 'bleating' like a sheep. For its first century the word kept this sense of loud, clamorous, noisy speech. Only later did it drift toward its modern meaning of something so glaringly obvious that it cannot be hidden, a shift from 'noisy' to 'conspicuous'. The spelling trap lies at the end: the unstressed final syllable sounds like a vague 'unt', tempting writers toward '-ent', but the correct ending is '-ant'.

How the word is built

• blat- (probably from Latin blatire, to babble or prattle)
• -ant (adjective suffix forming 'doing' something)