Word.ws English Dictionary

false modesty

false modesty noun: behavior that is intended to seem humble but comes across as fake and unflattering.

Noun

false modesty (countable and uncountable, plural false modesties)

  1. Behavior that is intended to seem humble but comes across as fake and unflattering.
    • Although having a large ego is considered undesirable, at times it is proper to take credit where it is due rather than display false modesty.
    • At her invitation he outlined for her the succeeding chapters with terse military accuracy ; and what she liked best and best understood was avoidance of that false modesty which condescends, turning technicality into pabulum.1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter VIII, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC

Forms of false modesty

pluralfalse modesties

Questions about false modesty

What does false modesty mean?
False modesty means behavior that is intended to seem humble but comes across as fake and unflattering.
What part of speech is false modesty?
False modesty is a noun.
What is the plural of false modesty?
The plural of false modesty is false modesties.

Words near false modesty in the dictionary

  1. false mermaids
  2. false mesquite
  3. false mesquites
  4. false miterwort
  5. false modesties
  6. false modesty
  7. false monarch
  8. false monarchs
  9. false morel
  10. false morels
  11. false move

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: false modesty (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-false modesty.wav.

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