Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Smugly or unduly sure of one's own righteousness.
- adjective Exhibiting smug or unwarranted confidence in one's own righteousness.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Righteous in one's own esteem; pharisaical.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Righteous in one's own esteem; pharisaic.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
piously self-assured andsmugly moralistic
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective excessively or hypocritically pious
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Becker used the unflattering term "self-righteous" to capture this idea and many times the expression of this is unflattering but it need not be as virtueless as that.
Paul Pardi: Protesting Protestantism: Why Religion Must Continue To Change Paul Pardi 2011
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Becker used the unflattering term "self-righteous" to capture this idea and many times the expression of this is unflattering but it need not be as virtueless as that.
Paul Pardi: Protesting Protestantism: Why Religion Must Continue To Change Paul Pardi 2011
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In fact, he don’t know nothing except that Dave Robicheaux, who he called a self-righteous lush, is about to get his wick snuffed.
Dave Robicheaux Ebook Boxed Set James Lee Burke 2002
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In fact, he don’t know nothing except that Dave Robicheaux, who he called a self-righteous lush, is about to get his wick snuffed.
Dave Robicheaux Ebook Boxed Set James Lee Burke 2002
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The insult, which refers to an ancient religious sect but is commonly used to refer to a self-righteous person, sent Martynyuk lunging for his fellow politician, grabbing him by the neck and pushing him to the ground.
Adam Martynyuk Attacks Ukraine Parliamentarian (VIDEO) The Huffington Post News Editors 2011
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They're willing to do anything in service to any liberal with money, and then they'll turn around and in self-righteous indignation claim that they have cleaner hands than anybody in the news business who accepts advertising or expresses a point of view.
Notable & Quotable 2011
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Frankly, I think they are self-righteous and insulting.
Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Ph.D.: Mitt Romney And The Curse of Blackness Obery M. Hendricks 2012
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What can anyone say to anything so overtly biased and self-righteous?
Discourse.net: Economist.com Does '7 Questions for Dan Froomkin' 2009
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This same weekend, at an Iowa "Thanksgiving Family Forum," Newt Gingrich sprayed bile at Occupy Wall Street protesters, denouncing them as lazy thieving self-righteous hypocrites, and instructing them to "go get a job right after you take a bath."
Marty Kaplan: Students: Cockroaches or Dirty Hippies? Marty Kaplan 2011
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They seem to stand for all I think is wrong with writing about literature, arbitrary disputes laced with hysteria, the creation of pointless ghettos, self-righteous sneering thinly disguised as intellectual superiority, tantrums about issues so unimportant in the global scale of things that I start to wonder myself about the point of what we do.
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