It's the Word of the Day podcast for May 7th.

Today's word is Bumptious, spelled B-U-M-P-T-I-O-U-S. Bumptius is an adjective.

It describes people who are rudely and often noisily, confident,

or over-assertive. It can also be applied to actions or behaviors that show this same attitude.

Here's the word used in a sentence from The Spectator by Lloyd Evans.

She comes across as a bumpious, irritating 10-year-old who believes that her main vice,

her steamroller self-confidence, is a virtue.

While evidence dates the word bumpcious to the beginning of the 19th century, it was uncommon

enough decades later that Edward Bulwer Lytton included the following in his 1850 My No novel. She holds her head higher, I think,

said the landlord smiling. She was always not exactly proud-like, but what I call

bumptious. I never heard that word before, said the parson, laying down his knife and fork,

bumpious indeed, though I believe it is not in the dictionary,

has crept into familiar parlance, especially amongst young folks at school and college.

The word is, of course, now in the dictionary.

Ours notes that it comes from the noun bump and the suffix, T-I-O-U-S,

echoing other disapproving modifiers, including

captious, meaning fault-finding, and fractious, meaning troublemaking. With your word of the day,

I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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