Narcissistic

How to spell narcissistic

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce narcissistic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does narcissistic mean?

1. adjectiveShowing excessive interest in or admiration of oneself, often at the expense of others.

Narcissistic in a sentence

• His narcissistic obsession with the mirror delayed them every morning.

• The manager's narcissistic need for constant praise drained the whole team.

Where does narcissistic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to Narcissus, a beautiful youth in Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and wasted away gazing at it. His name, Narkissos in Greek, was linked by the ancients to narke, meaning 'numbness' or 'torpor' (the same root that gives us 'narcotic'), perhaps because of the dreamy stupor of his self-absorption. The flower called the narcissus, which droops over still water, took its name from the same story. In the early twentieth century the psychologist Sigmund Freud popularised 'narcissism' as a clinical term for excessive self-love, and the adjective 'narcissistic' followed to describe that trait. The doubled 's' in the middle, which is the usual spelling trap, comes straight from the Greek and Latin spelling of the name, where the single 'c' is hard and the 'ss' is the cluster that does the work.

How the word is built

• narciss- (from Narcissus, the self-admiring figure of Greek myth)
• -ist (one who)
• -ic (adjective suffix)