Word.ws English Dictionary

bovarysm

bovarysm noun: an imagined or unrealistic conception of oneself.

Noun

bovarysm (uncountable)

  1. An imagined or unrealistic conception of oneself.
  2. An anxiety to escape from a social or sentimental condition judged to be unsatisfactory, sometimes by building a fictitious personality.

Forms of bovarysm

alternative formbovarism
alternative formBovarysm

Origin of bovarysm

Named after the character of Emma Bovary in Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary + -ism.

Questions about bovarysm

What does bovarysm mean?
Bovarysm means an imagined or unrealistic conception of oneself.
What part of speech is bovarysm?
Bovarysm is a noun.

Words near bovarysm in the dictionary

  1. Bovard
  2. Bovards
  3. bovarism
  4. bovarist
  5. bovarists
  6. bovarysm
  7. Bovas
  8. bovate
  9. bovates
  10. bove
  11. Bovee

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bovarysm (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: “bovarysm.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bovarysm. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.