adjective

• Showing excessive confidence or pride.

  ‘overweening ambition’

  More example sentences

  • ‘They do not look for, do not see, and do not achieve insight into their fatal flaws - arrogance, overweening pride, hypocrisy, ineptitude, and, increasingly, irrelevance.’
  • ‘There, culture is seen as synonymous with the country's national identity, with its almost arrogant self-belief, and with an overweening pride in its own achievements.’
  • ‘We organised races, and spurred by overweening confidence, tested the crafts' stability by standing on the seats and swaying until tipped into the cold water.’
  • ‘To those I would add presumptuous, imperious, overweening and authoritarian.’
  • ‘It was an age of excess, of overweening ambition, of greed, and phoniness, and sucking up, and the glorification of strange, obnoxious, preening, uninteresting people.’
  • ‘The actor conveys at the same instant the character's overweening pride, as well as an element of self-knowledge, which borders on self-disgust.’
  • ‘Elizabeth indignantly rejects him, on the grounds of his overweening pride, the part he has played in separating Jane from Bingley, and his alleged treatment of Wickham.’
  • ‘Although he was an academic, he did not appear to have the arrogance and overweening sense of self-importance that some of his kind possess.’
  • ‘For the medieval period, especially the Renaissance, is replete with examples of overweening pride in the human place in the cosmos.’
  • ‘He stated in a haunted, whispered voice and Ikeda nearly apologized for bringing it up, but his overweening pride would not allow it.’
  • ‘Later, desiring heaven, he achieves it, only to be thrown down from there because of his overweening pride in his merit.’
  • ‘It is the overweening ambition of the theory to explain or explain away rational thought, including philosophy.’
  • ‘His best qualification for the job was his overweening ambition, nothing else.’
  • ‘A legal system needs multiple lines of defense against miscarriages of justice, and historically the jury has had few rivals as a way of protecting defendants from overweening official power.’
  • ‘The redemption of Judas, the challenges of pusillanimous leadership and the sin of overweening arrogance are handled deftly in this timeless tale.’
  • ‘The overweening arrogance of the Supreme Court.’
  • ‘The answer is clear - his overweening ambition.’
  • ‘But if she wasn't a go-getting 11-year old, she is making up for it at 29 with an overweening ambition to grow her company.’
  • ‘The notion itself has an overweening hubris to it.’
  • ‘People soon became disillusioned with the more hard-edged forms of modernism, and aghast at the overweening urge to control demonstrated by totalitarian regimes from the thirties to the fifties.’

  Synonyms

  overconfident, conceited, cocksure, cocky, smug, haughty, supercilious, disdainful, lofty, patronizing, arrogant, proud, vain, vainglorious, self-important, egotistical, high-handed, magisterial, cavalier, imperious, domineering, dictatorial, overbearing, presumptuous, lordly, peremptory, pompous, officious, blustering, boastful, self-assertive, opinionated, bold, forward, insolent

  View synonyms