Blatantly

How to spell blatantly

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce blatantly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does blatantly mean?

1. adverbIn an obvious and unashamed way, with no attempt to hide something wrong.

Blatantly in a sentence

• The report was blatantly false, listing sales for a shop that had closed years earlier.

• He blatantly ignored the queue and walked straight to the counter.

Where does blatantly come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from the adjective 'blatant', which appears to have been coined by the English poet Edmund Spenser around 1596 in his epic 'The Faerie Queene', where he wrote of the 'blatant beast', a monster whose roaring mouth represented slander and scandal. Spenser's exact source is genuinely uncertain, but scholars most often connect it to the Latin verb 'blatire', meaning 'to babble' or 'to prattle noisily', and some link it to Scots 'blatand', meaning 'bleating'. The original flavour was therefore about loud, noisy, clamorous speech, and over the 1700s the sense drifted toward 'glaringly obvious' or 'shamelessly conspicuous'. The adverb form simply adds the ordinary '-ly' ending to mean 'in an unmistakably obvious way'. The spelling trap is the single 't' in the middle and the '-ant' ending (not '-ent'), since the unstressed second syllable gives no clue.

How the word is built

• blatant (obvious, brazen)
• -ly (adverb suffix)