megalomaniacn.adj.

1885 Manitoba Daily Free Press 18 Dec. 2/2 How would ‘megalomaniacs’ do as a ‘way up’ name for ‘mugwumps’? This suggestion is respectfully dedicated to our American cousins.

1890 New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon at Megalomania Many megalomaniacs are illegitimate children.

1899 Speaker 29 July 105/1 He [sc. Signor Crispi] was neither himself a megalomaniac nor the framer of the Triple Alliance.

1928 M. Connolly Mr. Blue 97 Conservative historians describe any man with a passion for greatness as a megalomaniac.

1948 Life 6 Sept. 103/2 Only a megalomaniac can believe that 146 million Americans can resist attack by all the rest of the world.

1964 L. Woolf Beginning Again ii. 132 Nearly all good editors—like the owners of some of them, the great newspaper owners—become megalomaniacs and suffer from the hallucination that they control and exercise great power.

1991 Vanity Fair (N.Y.) Mar. 111/3 Several of..[the] shareholders were fed up with underwriting the vanity of a megalomaniac who owned less than 1 percent of the corporation.

1899 Pall Mall Gaz. 14 Feb. 2/3 A megalomaniac world is always apt to regard a waistcoat-pocket community as a joke.

1929 W. J. Locke Ancestor Jorico 29 They had to attribute the great fortune to the megalomaniac dreams of a dying man.

1967 Listener 6 July 10/2 The megalomaniac diagrams of the late eighteenth-century French neo-classical architects.

1991 Kauai (Hawaii) Times 1 Mar. a 5/3 Some megalomaniac developer..might consider getting his hands on it and turning it into yet another resort destination.

1892 Contemp. Rev. Feb. 167 A sort of megalomaniacal aberration.

1899 Internat. Jrnl. Ethics 9 314 Nietzsche's style is uncouth and noisy... There is, moreover,..a megalomaniacal conceit that outdoes Walt Whitman.

1956 Amer. Jrnl. Internat. Law 50 588 The new Government in Buenos Aires unquestionably has dropped the megalomaniacal aspects of the ultranationalism of the Perón movement.

1992 A. Gore Earth in Balance xiii. 238 A megalomaniacal ruler anxious to acquire the fissionable material with which to construct nuclear weapons.