Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who is subject to mythomania; a chronic liar.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Someone who suffers from mythomania.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Research in Soviet archives led Antony Beevor to call Andre Malraux a "mythomaniac".

    Papa Hemingway a spy? Lemon Hound 2009

  • A mythomaniac, Malraux did heroes wonderfully well, and the great moment in "Man's Fate" occurs when Katov, the professional revolutionary and the novel's hero, gives his cyanide pill to a comrade terrified of being burned alive by Chiang Kai-shek's troops.

    To the Barricades! Revolutionaries in Novels Joseph Epstein 2011

  • Putting it more starkly, he was a mythomaniac, but the autobiography itself, "Each Man in His Time" 1974, is among the most entertaining books about Hollywood ever written.

    We Shall Not See His Like Again Richard Schickel 2011

  • Of course, they admit, he has also been fingered as a mythomaniac trickster.

    The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey – review 2011

  • His description of the origins of the Vietnamese Communist party, for example, is wrong in almost every particular; his warm admiration for John Paul Vann, the mythomaniac American counter-insurgency officer whose career was detailed in Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer-prize winning Bright and Shining Lie (1988), is particularly perverse.

    The Atlantic and Its Enemies by Norman Stone DD Guttenplan 2010

  • It is hard to be sure because almost all the evidence comes from Alma herself, and she was an auto-mythomaniac.

    When You Don't Believe 2009

  • Not even the mythomaniac Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel could have anticipated how her legacy would persist triumphantly into the next millennium.

    Spotlight on Coco Chanel Collins, Amy Fine 2009

  • ‘I am totally fascinated with the mythomaniac fantasia that characterizes some of the villa gardens that surround Rome, and that I first read about in Joscelyn Godwin’s great The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance.

    Erik Davis: On The Road 2: Italian Garden Magic | Disinformation 2007

  • Not even the mythomaniac Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel could have anticipated how her legacy would persist triumphantly into the next millennium.

    Spotlight on Coco Chanel Collins, Amy Fine 2009

  • L Ron Hubbard was a mythomaniac, a liar and a deeply dishonest person.

    Reminding You That All Religions Were Once New James F. McGrath 2008

Comments

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  • I went back to see Belbo the following afternoon, and we talked a little about our visitor. Belbo said the man had seemed a mythomaniac to him. "Did you notice how he quoted that Rakosky, or Rostropovich, as if the man were Kant?"

    --Umberto Eco, 1988, Foucault's Pendulum, p. 150

    October 1, 2008

  • The pundits deploy their ungainly tact,

    Unwilling to say what is plainly fact.

    He doesn’t misstate

    Or exaggerate:

    The man is a frank mythomaniac.

    October 3, 2018