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Supercilious   /sˌupərsˈɪliəs/   Listen
Supercilious

adjective
1.
Having or showing arrogant superiority to and disdain of those one views as unworthy.  Synonyms: disdainful, haughty, imperious, lordly, overbearing, prideful, sniffy, swaggering.  "Haughty aristocrats" , "His lordly manners were offensive" , "Walked with a prideful swagger" , "Very sniffy about breaches of etiquette" , "His mother eyed my clothes with a supercilious air" , "A more swaggering mood than usual"
2.
Expressive of contempt.  Synonyms: sneering, snide.  "Spoke in a sneering jeering manner" , "Makes many a sharp comparison but never a mean or snide one"



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"Supercilious" Quotes from Famous Books



... answer to this letter either. Concluding that the good gray poet was either too busy or too gosh-darned mean to bother with the thing, I myself adopted an attitude of supercilious unconcern and closed the correspondence with the following ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley

... earrings and splendid fazzoletto of crimson and orange dyes, pounced down upon her for some supposed infraction of good manners—creanza, as they vividly express it here. Only Luigi looked a trifle bored. But Luigi has been a soldier, and has now attained the supercilious superiority of young-manhood, which smokes its cigar of an evening in the piazza and knows the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... baby thought so. She was a little girl, very little, only one night old; and she regarded him through her almond eyes with a supercilious look, as who should say, "Now, if he was only a bottle, instead of a big, useless policeman, why, one might put up with him;" which reflection opened the flood-gates of grief and set the little Chinee squalling: "Yow! Yow! Yap!" until the Sergeant held his ears, and a policeman carried ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... John alone. He received me with the utmost politeness. I did not keep him a moment in suspense as to the purport of my visit. But I had no sooner made it known, than, with a supercilious smile, he said, 'And have you, Madam, been prevailed upon to revive that ridiculous old story?' Ridiculous, I told him, was a term which he would find no one else do him the favour to make use of, in speaking ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney

... This was bad enough, but its effect was intensified by the demeanour of the Lieutenant-Governor and several military officers who were in attendance upon him. It seemed to the deputation that those gentlemen regarded them with supercilious impertinence; as a something which viceroyalty must be content, for the nonce, to endure, but as being altogether beyond the pale of their sympathies or interests. Nothing could have been in worse taste ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent


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