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Middlemarch vocabulary
551 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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vaunt
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► definition
Definition:"To boast; to make a vain display of one's own worth, attainments, decorations, or the like; to talk ostentatiously; to brag.Noah Webster. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
► uses
Uses:
And thus of one thing I may vaunte me,
At th' end I had the better in each degree,
By sleight, or force, or by some manner thing,
As by continual murmur or grudging,
Namely a-bed, there hadde they mischance,
There would I chide, and do them no pleasance:
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath's Prologue (1400)
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the very same Pride which prompts a man to vaunt and overvalue what he is, does so
forcibly incline him to contemn and disvalue what he has; whilst measuring his enjoyments by that
vast Idea he has formed of himself, tis impossible but he must think them below him.
Richard Allestree. The Government of the Tongue (1574)
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Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate that vaunted laboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode in which Dorothea would be wounded.
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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She slipped out of his arms and raised her head to give vent to her indignation and anger, but the indignation did not come off, and all her vaunted virtue and chastity was only sufficient to enable her to utter the phrase used by all ordinary women on such occasions:
“You must be mad.”
Anton Chekhov. The Party and other stories
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one man stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred pounds and walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred for his dog; and a third, seven hundred.
"Pooh! pooh!" said John Thornton; "Buck can start a thousand pounds."
"And break it out? and walk off with it for a hundred yards?" demanded Matthewson, a Bonanza King, he of the seven hundred vaunt.
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