grandiloquence means lofty, pompous or bombastic speech or writing. Lexicurio rates it Rare gem — a strength score of 81 out of 100.
Why “grandiloquence” is a great word
GRANDILOQUENCE — [Noun] Lofty, pompous, or bombastic speech or writing characterized by pretentious inflation. From Latin grandiloquentia, from grandiloquus ("using lofty speech"), from grandis ("grand, great") + loqui ("to speak"). First attested in English in the 1580s. Unlike "eloquence," which marries fluency with persuasive effect, or "verbosity," which merely denotes excessive wordiness, grandiloquence is a stylistic failure, a straining for majesty that betrays its own artifice. It is the thundering, empty oration of a minor official opening a pedestrian bridge, the labyrinthine sentence that dies of its own weight, and the academic prose that mistakes obscurity for profundity—the audible strain of an ego trying to fill a silence too large for it.
noun
- Lofty, pompous or bombastic speech or writing.