Meaning
Completely obvious and unmistakable, often offensively so, as with a lie told with no attempt at concealment; in its older and still current sense, noisy, clamorous, or vulgarly loud, as of crude advertising. The word is pejorative in both senses, and the shift from noise to conspicuousness is the key change since its coinage. Pejorative in both the 'obvious' and 'noisy' senses; a strong word for open, shameless wrongdoing. Regional use: General English (coined by Edmund Spenser, England, 1596).
Origin
The poet Edmund Spenser invented blatant in The Faerie Queene, where the 'blatant beast', a many-tongued monster whose tongues included barking dogs and 'tongues of mortall men', embodies slander and evil speech. Reference works date its first known use to 1596, the installment of the poem containing the beast, though the epic's opening books had appeared in 1590. Spenser likely coined it for its sound, perhaps suggested by Latin blatire, 'to babble', a derivation dictionaries flag as uncertain. The word passed into general use meaning noisy in an offensive, vulgar way by the 1650s; the now-dominant sense of glaringly obvious is recorded from 1889.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- blatancy
- blatantly
- blatantness
Usage Examples
- The referee missed a blatant foul right in front of the goal.
- Copying whole paragraphs into an essay is blatant plagiarism, whatever the excuse.
- His blatant favoritism toward certain clients finally cost him the manager's trust.