SYCOPHANT • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Sycophant

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noun

Sycophant n.

An informer; a talebearer. (Obs.) "Accusing sycophants, of all men, did best sort to his nature."

A base parasite; a mean or servile flatterer; especially, a flatterer of princes and great men. "A sycophant will everything admire: Each verse, each sentence, sets his soul on fire."

verb

Sycophant v. t.

To inform against; hence, to calumniate. (Obs.) "Sycophanting and misnaming the work of his adversary."

To play the sycophant toward; to flatter obsequiously.

Sycophant v. i. To play the sycophant.

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Etymology of 'Sycophant'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Sycophant" Quotes from Famous Books

... he was, and humiliating to patriotic pride as he was, to the dandy and ingrate of whom Mr. McAllister told. I like to think that, however Europeans may have laughed and wondered at the yokel out of place, for the sycophant denying his compatriots was reserved ...

— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... moved uneasily in his chair. His habitual violent spirit of contradiction rose up rebelliously in him, and he longed to give a sharp answer in confutation of the Cardinal's words, but there was a touch of the sycophant in his nature despite his personal pride, and he could not but reflect that Cardinals ranked above Archbishops, and that Felix Bonpre was in very truth a "prince of the Church" however much he himself elected to disclaim the ...

— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... vices they lay contiguous to and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and good liver, gluttonously fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler, had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced, too, with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much when the tailor by a court suit had made a new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakespeare ...

— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... SYCOPHANT, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is ...

— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... for the interest of the party that there should be any restoration while King James lived; this idea was diligently circulated by Kelly, a man described by Drummond as full of trick, falsehood, deceit, and imposition; and joined to these, having qualities that make up a thorough sycophant. ...

— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson

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