Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Self-satisfied, often smugly so.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Pleased with one's self; self-satisfied.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Satisfied with one's own character, capacity, and doings; self-satisfied.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Complacently
self-satisfied
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective contented to a fault with oneself or one's actions
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Napoleon had drowned: It was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago.
Interstate 69 Matt Dellinger 2010
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Anger and astonishment kept Mrs. Lilias silent, — while her old friend, in his self-complacent manner, was making known to her his political speculations.
The Abbot 2008
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They belong to a self-complacent time, and we to a time of doubt and unsatisfied aspiration, and the two spirits are unsympathetic.
Voltaire 2007
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I would have you neither bashful nor self-complacent; I would not have you in terror of losing my affection — that would be an insult — but neither would I have you wear your love lightly as a thing of course.
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The self-complacent ignorance with which this remark was made was ludicrous in the extreme.
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A bald deism has undoubtedly been the creed of some of the purest and most generous men that have ever trod the earth, but none the less on that account is it in its essence a doctrine of self-complacent individualism from which society has little to hope, and with which there is little chance of the bulk of society ever sympathizing.
Voltaire 2007
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The day you become too self-complacent will be the day you stop noticing this very same nay-saying.
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It lacks the self-complacent unreasonableness of Board of Works classicism.
A Modern Utopia Herbert George 2006
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This sort of misbehaviour varies in degree from the black hatred and fury of an uncontrolled egotism to what verges in some cases upon justifiable criticism of slightly fatuous or self-complacent behaviour.
The Shape of Things to Come Herbert George 2006
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All he said was said in his throat and nose, for it is thus the Flamands speak, but I heard him to the end of his paragraph without proffering a word of correction, whereat he looked vastly self-complacent, convinced, no doubt, that he had acquitted himself like a real born and bred “Anglais.”
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