Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Megalomania
/ˌmɛɡələˈmeɪniə/noun
An inflated belief in one's own power and importance.
The Greek roots
μέγας
mégas
great, large
μανία
manía
madness, frenzy
Literally: “greatness madness”
The story of the word
French alienists assembled mégalomanie in the middle of the nineteenth century and English borrowed it a few decades later. μανία was not automatically an illness in Greek: the Phaedrus ranks divine madness above sober self-possession, and Plato there links the μάντις, the prophet, to the same root. The suffix went on to breed a Victorian catalogue of specialist insanities, monomania, kleptomania, dipsomania, nearly all of which psychiatry dropped and ordinary speech kept.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
megaphonemegalithmaniamaniac
In a sentence
The plan had a whiff of megalomania about it, starting with the private lake.
Biographers reach for megalomania whenever the subject builds a capital city.