blurb
/bləːb
/noun
A short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes.Indian, not Native American, is how his book blurbs describe him: in one short story in this collection a character dryly observes that ‘Native American’ is an oxymoron....
- The blurb described the book as a private detective's journey through personal betrayal to a form of redemption.
- If he has got a way with words, he might want to think about firing the person writing his promotional blurbs and doing it himself.
verb [with object] informal, chiefly North American
Write or contribute a blurb for (a book, film, or other product): this is the first time I have blurbed a whole line of books...
- He glowingly blurbed the book as ‘splendid and wholly convincing’.
- No writer has excoriated the thirst for fame with more vigor in recent years - and yet here we have an actor (whom you lovingly pimped years ago in the magazine) blurbing your book.
- I mean, a critic has to have an agenda to take the people who blurbed the book to task: they were all sentenced by him to ‘perdition eternal.’
Origin
Early 20th century: coined by Gelett Burgess (died 1951), American humorist.
Not many words are simply made up, but blurb, ‘a short description written to promote a book or other product’, is one of them. It was invented by the American humorist Gelett Burgess in 1914, although the jacket of one of Burgess's earlier works carried an image of a young lady with the facetious name of ‘Miss Blinda Blurb’.