a. [f. FLAUNT v. + -Y1.]
1. a. Of persons: Given to display or show, ostentatious, vain. b. Of things: Showy, gaudy.
1796. J. Owen, Trav. Europe, II. 260. These flaunty caps are of no mean expence; in some their value is said to exceed ten louis-d’ors.
1825. Hone, Every-day Bk., I. 585. His lady is sometimes a strapping girl, though usually a boy in female attire, indescribably flaunty and gaudy; her head in full dress; in her right hand a brass ladle, in her left a handkerchief like to my lord’s.
1833. Marryat, P. Simple (1863), 272. ‘There’s a flaunty sort of young woman at the poteen shop there.’
1843. Ld. Houghton, Let., in T. W. Reid, Life, I. 292. His [O’Brien’s] mind seems somewhat less flaunty, and his self-complacency somewhat subdued.
1856. Mrs. Browning, Aur. Leigh, I. 872.
| Aye, and while your common men | |
| Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine, | |
| And dust the flaunty carpets of the world | |
| For kings to walk on. |
2. Sc. ‘Capricious, eccentric, unsteady’ (Jam.)
1821. Galt, Annals Parish, xx. 198. Mrs M‘Vicar, who was a clever, hearing-all sort of a neighbour, said my sermon was greatly thought of, and that I had surprised every body; but I was fearful there was something of jocularity at the bottom of this, for she was a flaunty woman, and liked well to give a good-humoured jibe or jeer.
Hence Flauntily adv., Flauntiness.
1830. Examiner, 323/2. We like people to … air their gaudiest pretensions bravely and flauntily.
1851. D. Jerrold, St. Giles, iii. 24. A woman flauntily dressed, and burning in red ribands, who suddenly entered the shop.
1854. Blackw. Mag., LXXV. April, 434/1. It is a school whose works we are exceedingly in want of, to enable us to correct the tendency of the English style towards weakness of design, effeminacy of composition, and flauntiness of colouring.
