Word.ws English Dictionary

self-serious

self-serious adjective: taking oneself too seriously, pretentiously and humorlessly convinced of one's own seriousness.

Adjective

self-serious (comparative more self-serious, superlative most self-serious)

  1. Taking oneself too seriously, pretentiously and humorlessly convinced of one's own seriousness.
    • This is not to say that there is a self-serious bone in Bill's body. He's a kid on a trike with a slingshot and a peashooter -- always has been, always will be.1995, Bill Garner, Seriously Now, Pelican Publishing
    • Elizabeth had never recorded any period of her existence, failing to grasp the point of an exercise so self-absorbed and self-serious.1998, Douglas Hobbie, This Time Last Year: A Novel

Forms of self-serious

comparativemore self-serious
superlativemost self-serious

Origin of self-serious

From self- + serious.

Questions about self-serious

What does self-serious mean?
Self-serious means taking oneself too seriously, pretentiously and humorlessly convinced of one's own seriousness.
What part of speech is self-serious?
Self-serious is an adjective.

Words near self-serious in the dictionary

  1. self-selected
  2. self-selecting
  3. self-selection
  4. self-selections
  5. self-selects
  6. self-serious
  7. self-seriousness
  8. self-serve
  9. self-service
  10. self-serving
  11. self-servingly

Source and license

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