swagger
/ˈswaɡə
/verb [no object, with adverbial of direction]
Walk or behave in a very confident and arrogant or self-important way: he swaggered along the corridor (as adjective swaggering) a swaggering gait...
- It's not just a question of how the president walks or swaggers or how he talks.
- The Doctor walked - no, not walked, swaggered - over to me.
- After a lot of tick-ticking from my bright orange watch, Tyler walked, no, swaggered over, brandishing a scrap of paper triumphantly.
Synonyms
strut, parade, stride, roll, prance;
walk confidently, walk arrogantly
North American informal sashay
archaic swash
boast, brag, bray, bluster, crow, gloat, parade, strut, posture, pose, blow one's own trumpet, lord it
informal show off, swank, play to the gallery
literary rodomontade
noun [in singular]
A very confident and arrogant or self-important gait or manner: they strolled around the camp with an exaggerated swagger...
- After years of hard-earned success on Broadway, where audiences lapped up their chaotic, anything-goes approach, the brothers arrived in Hollywood with an arrogant swagger.
- A goal ahead after four minutes, two up after 19, his players were coasting, and playing with the confident swagger of a team who knew it, when everything unravelled with alarming simplicity.
- The Saints duly went marching in, although it was more of a triumphal swagger in the end, and it seemed that everyone in Paisley wanted to be in that number, which of course was one.
Synonyms
strut, parading, roll, prancing;
confidence, arrogance, self-assurance, show, ostentation
boasting, bragging, bluster, bumptiousness, brashness, swashbuckling, vainglory, puffery
informal showing off, swank
literary braggadocio, rodomontade, gasconade
adjective
1 [attributive] Denoting a coat or jacket cut with a loose flare from the shoulders.
2British informal, dated Smart or fashionable: I’ll take you somewhere swagger...
- No hint of eighteenth-century neo-Palladian swagger or its kitsch modern imitations.
Derivatives
swaggerer
- We need a few more swaggerers like Andrew Carnegie, the Marquis of Bute, or Sir Charles Tennant, all Scots who built great industrial empires and made certain that the world knew all about it.
- He will never give up his chewing tobacco and spittoon, according to an insider, although he is said to be a Virginia gentleman rather than a Texas swaggerer.
- Back in 1956 Jonathan Flynn was a hard-drinking young swaggerer and self-proclaimed Next Great American Poet.
swaggeringly
- During imperial times, that archetypal native, John Bull, was swaggeringly sure of himself: common sense told this true-born Englishman that he was a representative of a large empire.
- But these last two points are faults of the plays, not the production, which at its best is a breathlessly pell-mell, swaggeringly epic dose of theatre.
- It was the schoolboy's dream, humiliating England, swaggeringly and insouciantly triumphant.
Origin
Early 16th century: apparently a frequentative of the verb swag.
A bulging bag is the link between swagger and swag (Middle English). This is what swag originally meant, and it later led to the word being used as a verb in the sense ‘to make something sway or sag’. Swagger appears to have developed from this, expressing the idea of walking or behaving arrogantly or self-importantly. By the late 18th century the ‘bulging bag’ meaning of swag had come to be applied to a thief's booty. It also came to refer to a bundle of personal belongings carried by a traveller in the Australian bush.