self-applause

Example Sentences

Recent Examples of Synonyms for self-applause
Noun
  • Whether Gunn fell victim to the kryptonite of excessive studio notes, his desire to populate the film with his stalwart company of actors, or the hubris of not needing to offer reasons to be invested in these characters beyond the mere fact of their existence is unclear.
    Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 8 July 2025
  • The Greeks told us that heroism was a negotiation within someone, sometimes a war between somebody's great strengths and their great flaws, like Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths.
    CBS News, CBS News, 4 July 2025
Noun
  • One week later, serious questions remain about what actions local leaders took after ominous warnings from the National Weather Service, echoing other recent high-profile natural disasters marked by accusations of government complacency.
    Josh Campbell, CNN Money, 12 July 2025
  • Some choose complacency — seduced by comfort and the illusion that someone else will do the hard work of changing things.
    F. Willis Johnson, Twin Cities, 10 July 2025
Noun
  • The result is an almost weary vanity, in which the author plays himself as if under duress, simultaneously flourishing and folding up the self.
    James Wood, New Yorker, 14 July 2025
  • Its offerings—face oils, supplements, vitamin treatments, and serums—reflect a holistic approach to skincare, treating the skin as an organ and prioritizing health over vanity.
    Ian Malone, Vogue, 10 July 2025
Noun
  • Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking.
    David Brooks, Mercury News, 16 Apr. 2025
  • Just as there’s no dramatic build-up to Maria landing the part, there’s no romance to the process of acting it, nor the slightest whiff of self-satisfaction in recreating iconic scenes.
    David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 21 Mar. 2025
Noun
  • On Saturday, on the streets of Washington, Donald Trump will throw himself a costly and ostentatious military parade, a gaudy display of waste and vainglory staged solely to inflate the president’s dirigible-sized ego.
    Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2025
  • The conceit is saved from vainglory by the gravity Cage brings to the performance.
    Isaac Butler, The New Yorker, 1 Dec. 2023
Noun
  • In advance of the ceremony, the finalists were asked an essential question: Orwell claimed that prose writers have four ‘great motivations’ (putting aside the need to earn a living): sheer egoism; aesthetic enthusiasm; historical impulse; and political purpose.
    Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 16 June 2025
  • Trump’s slogans—America First and Make America Great Again—embody the essence of populism, namely using ideology to advance a political program that is morally unconstrained and driven by collective egoism.
    BÁLINT MADLOVICS, Foreign Affairs, 10 Feb. 2025
Noun
  • Most of the film plays out in something close to real time, and the directors, loath to hurry scenes along, slow the action down with a technical virtuosity that sometimes tilts into self-admiration.
    Justin Chang, New Yorker, 4 Apr. 2025
  • At first, Oliver meekly and gratefully laps up, metaphorically, the warm milk of affection that the family bestows on him between their rounds of backbiting and oblivious self-admiration.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 18 Nov. 2023
Noun
  • What’s Your Financial Blind Spot? For example, maybe your blind spot is overconfidence, a blind spot especially common in men that is pretty well explained in our general unwillingness to ask for directions (when that was a thing).
    Tim Maurer, Forbes.com, 11 May 2025
  • Solskjaer felt that overconfidence bordering on arrogance might be PSG’s Achilles’ heel.
    Andy Mitten, New York Times, 20 Apr. 2025
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

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Cite this Entry

“Self-applause.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/self-applause. Accessed 19 Jul. 2025.

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