Bombast

The story of the word

βόμβυξ was the silkworm, probably itself borrowed into Greek from further east; Latin bombyx drifted to bombax and then to any soft stuffing, and by the 1560s bombast in English was the cotton wadding tailors used to pad out a doublet. The figurative sense arrived within twenty years, and Shakespeare uses it of a man puffing up his own speech. A persistent story links the word to Paracelsus, whose family name was Bombast, but the tailoring sense is older than his reputation.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English

First recorded

16th century