cocksure
/kɒkˈʃɔː
/ /kɒkˈʃʊə /adjective
Confident in an excessive or arrogant way: the cocksure golf prodigy from California...
- I was stripped of a confidence that could have almost been described as arrogant - certainly cocksure - I don't think I liked myself at all in high school.
- He is capable, confident, and cocksure, and perhaps most importantly, seemingly content with his chosen profession and lifestyle.
- He had hated the Marines' cocksure arrogance, all the more infuriating because it was so clearly justified.
Synonyms
arrogant, conceited, overconfident, overweening, cocky, smug, haughty, supercilious, disdainful, lofty, patronizing, proud, vain, vainglorious, self-important, swollen-headed, egotistical, presumptuous, lordly, pompous, blustering, boastful, brash, self-assertive, opinionated, bold, forward, insolent
informal high and mighty, throwing one's weight about/around, uppish
rare hubristic
Derivatives
cocksurely
- He is intensely and cocksurely moral, but his morality and his self-interest are crudely identical.
- She has neither skills nor experience and should have aimed for entry-level positions she was qualified for rather than heading cocksurely for the top.
- He makes the error of cocksurely mistaking his own notions of what he presumes about evolutionary biology, for the reality itself.
cocksureness
/ noun ...- In a tenure marked by cocksureness and ineptitude, his greatest accomplishment may be inadvertently awakening a media reform movement.
- The president let that slip away, deepening divisions by adopting a my-way-or-the-highway cocksureness on both domestic and foreign affairs.
- The troubles and disasters the country has met do not stem from threats by others, but from its own cocksureness and arrogance.
Origin
Early 16th century: from archaic cock (a euphemism for God) + sure; later associated with cock1.