Word.ws English Dictionary

ballyhooed

ballyhooed adjective: sensationalized; presented with grand claims. Also the simple past and past participle of ballyhoo.

Adjective

ballyhooed (comparative more ballyhooed, superlative most ballyhooed)

  1. Sensationalized; presented with grand claims.
    • Waitress: There's a man over there who says he's waiting for you.
      Niles: Ah. No doubt the much ballyhooed Bob.1996, Frasier episode 3.11
    • "...viewers didn't hate them. They were just shocked by them. And all of the ballyhooed techniques used by the armies of market researchers at CBS utterly failed to distinguish between these two very different emotions."2005, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell, page 175

Also used as

ballyhooed is also the simple past and past participle of ballyhoo.

Forms of ballyhooed

comparativemore ballyhooed
superlativemost ballyhooed

Origin of ballyhooed

From ballyhoo + -ed.

Questions about ballyhooed

What does ballyhooed mean?
Ballyhooed means sensationalized; presented with grand claims.
What part of speech is ballyhooed?
Ballyhooed is an adjective.

Words near ballyhooed in the dictionary

  1. Ballyhack
  2. Ballyhaise
  3. Ballyhale
  4. Ballyhoge
  5. ballyhoo
  6. ballyhooed
  7. ballyhooer
  8. ballyhooers
  9. ballyhooing
  10. ballyhoos
  11. ballying about

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ballyhooed (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “ballyhooed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ballyhooed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.