bonfire of the vanities
bonfire of the vanities noun: an act of burning, or otherwise destroying, that which is vain or a temptation to immorality.
Noun
bonfire of the vanities (plural bonfires of the vanities)
- An act of burning, or otherwise destroying, that which is vain or a temptation to immorality.
- For the wild licence of the Carnival, for the Pagen pageantry that the Medicean princes had loved, for the sensual songs that had once floated up from every street of the City of Flowers — there were now bonfires of the vanities in the public squares; holocausts of immoral books, indecent pictures...1900, Edmund G. Gardner, The Story of Florence, page 122
- Our nation has experienced a bonfire of the vanities based on the greed of the high establishment.1991, Proceedings of the AFL-CIO Convention, page 196
Forms of bonfire of the vanities
| plural | bonfires of the vanities |
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Questions about bonfire of the vanities
- What does bonfire of the vanities mean?
- Bonfire of the vanities means an act of burning, or otherwise destroying, that which is vain or a temptation to immorality.
- What part of speech is bonfire of the vanities?
- Bonfire of the vanities is a noun.
- What is the plural of bonfire of the vanities?
- The plural of bonfire of the vanities is bonfires of the vanities.
Words near bonfire of the vanities in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bonfire of the vanities (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.
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Cite this entry: “bonfire of the vanities.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bonfire_of_the_vanities. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.