flaunt

UK/flɔːnt/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia/flɔnt/

flaunt verb: to wave or flutter smartly in the wind.

Verb (1)

flaunt (third-person singular simple present flaunts, present participle flaunting, simple past and past participle flaunted)

(archaic, intransitive) To wave or flutter smartly in the wind.
- The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and seed-vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their death than ever while flaunting in the sun.1851 April 9, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, →OCLC
- Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset!1892, Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, in Leaves of Grass […], Philadelphia, Pa.: David McKay, publisher, […], →OCLC, page 133
(transitive) To parade, display with ostentation.
- Near-synonym: vaunt
- She’s always flaunting her designer clothes.
Synonyms:

vaunt
(archaic, intransitive, literary) To show off, as with flashy clothing.
- You Sot, ſays ſhe, you loyter about Alehouſes and Taverns, ſpend your Time at Billiards, Nine-pins or Puppet-ſhovvs, or flaunt about the Streets in your nevv gilt Chariot, never minding me nor your numerous Family; […]1712, Humphry Polesworth [pseudonym; John Arbuthnot], “How Bull and Frog went to Law with Lord Strutt about the Premisses, and were Joined by the Rest of the Tradesmen”, in Law is a Bottomless-Pit....
- One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade.1733, [Alexander Pope], An Essay on Man. […], (please specify |epistle=I to IV), London: […] J[ohn] Wilford, […], →OCLC
Synonyms:

ostentate, preen, swagger, aura farm, boulevardier, cut a wide swath, cut it fat, cut round, exhibitionize, figure away

Noun

flaunt (plural flaunts)

(obsolete) Anything displayed for show.
- Should I , in these my borrow'd flaunts, behold
  The sternness of his presence?c. 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Winters Tale”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...

Verb (2)

flaunt (third-person singular simple present flaunts, present participle flaunting, simple past and past participle flaunted)

(proscribed) To flout.
- By that late date, however, the golden age of the lurid paperback book was pretty much over, and the sort of punishment meted out to Aday and Maxey for flaunting the sexual mores of a McCarthyite culture would soon be a thing of the past.2001, Susan Stryker, Queer Pulp, page 22
- Wheeler said companies already are flaunting the rules by offering free or sponsored data services for some products.2017 January 20, David Shepardson, “Outgoing FCC chair warns against overturning net neutrality”, in Reuters, archived from the original on 28 Nov 2018

flaunt meaning in Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada

flaunt in Bengali

জাঁকজমক করে প্রদর্শন করা, গর্বের সাথে দেখানো, দেখনদারি করা

flaunt in Malayalam

show off, display ostentatiously, make a (great) show of: വേഷപ്പകിട്ടു കാട്ടുക, പകിട്ടു കാട്ടുക, ഭൂഷാഡംബരം പ്രദർശിപ്പിക്കുക, കെട്ടിച്ചമഞ്ഞു നടക്കുക, ഡംഭു കാണിക്കുക, മോടി കാണിക്കുക

flaunt in Kannada

ಮೆರೆದಾಡು, ಕೊಬ್ಬಿ ಬೀಗು

More languagesFewer languages

flaunt in Persian: نمایش دادن
flaunt in Vietnamese: khoe

Examples of flaunt in a sentence

At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time—a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the Red Weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place.1895–1897, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “Wreckage”, in The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, published 1898, →OCLC, book II (The...
The house came into sight, above the cedar grove beyond whose black interstices an apple orchard flaunted in the sunny afternoon.1931, William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Library of America, published 1985, page 26:
He pierced with his sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper and in smart neckties.1903 September 28, Henry James, The Ambassadors, London: Methuen & Co. […], →OCLC:
Never one to miss an opportunity to flaunt his wealth, Khashoggi let his yacht be used for the 1983 Bond film Never Say Never Again.2017 June 7, Adam Lusher, “Adnan Khashoggi: the 'whoremonger' whose arms deals funded a playboy life of decadence and 'pleasure wives'”, in...

All 24 example sentences with flaunt

Synonyms of flaunt

20 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of flaunt

Forms of flaunt

Verb
third-person singular present	flaunts
present participle	flaunting
past participle	flaunted
past	flaunted
alternative form (obsolete)	flant
Noun
plural	flaunts

Past tense of flaunt: flaunted

Origin of flaunt

Of North Germanic origin. Perhaps related to Norwegian flanta (“to show off, wander about”), Icelandic flana (“to rush about, act rashly or heedlessly”) and then also to French flâner (“to wander around, loiter”). Alternatively, it could be related to Swedish flankt (“loosely, flutteringly”) (compare English flaunt-a-flaunt), from flanka (“waver, hang and wave about, ramble”), a nasalised variant of flakka (“to waver”), related to Middle English flacken (“to move to and fro, flutter, palpitate”). See flack.

By confusion with flout.

Words formed from flaunt

Words that rhyme with flaunt

Questions about flaunt

What does flaunt mean?: Flaunt means to wave or flutter smartly in the wind.
What is flaunt in Urdu?: Flaunt in Urdu is اکڑفوں, خودنمائش, طمطراق. See Flaunt meaning in Urdu.
How do you use flaunt in a sentence?: At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time—a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the Red Weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place.
What part of speech is flaunt?: Flaunt can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce flaunt?: Flaunt is pronounced /flɔːnt/ (UK).
What is the past tense of flaunt?: The past tense of flaunt is flaunted.

Words near flaunt in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: flaunt (page history and authors); flaunt (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); Flaunt (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); flaunt (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); flaunt (Kannada Wiktionary) (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-flaunt.ogg, en-au-flaunt.ogg.

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