smug
Adjective Satellite
- marked by excessive complacency or self-satisfaction
- "a smug glow of self-congratulation"
Adj
- irritatingly pleased with oneself; offensively self-complacent, self-satisfied.
- Showing smugness; showing self-complacency, self-satisfaction.
- Studiously neat or nice, especially in dress; spruce; affectedly precise; smooth and prim.
Verb
- To make smug, or spruce.
- to adopt an offensively self-complacent expression.
- To seize; to confiscate.
- To hush up.
Noun
- The smuggling trade.
Adjective
- Highly self-satisfied and complacent.
Examples
- a smug look on her face
- His SMUG face after playing a triple-triple bingo was truly unbearable.
- Kate looked extremely smug this morning.
Origin / Etymology
Originally "spruce, neat," from Low German smuk (“pretty”), from Middle Low German smuk (“lithe, delicate, neat, trim”), although the g of the English word is not easily explained. The ultimate source should be Proto-West Germanic *smeugan (“to crawl, creep”).
From the Low German derived also North Frisian smok, Danish smuk and Swedish smukk (now obsolete or dialectal).
Compare also Middle High German gesmuc (“ornament”) and smücken (“to dress, to adorn”), both ultimately from smiegen (“to press to, insert, wrap, to nestle”), hence German schmiegen, Schmuck and schmücken. The adjective schmuck, however, was borrowed from Low German. See smock for more.
Synonyms
self-satisfied, Woosterian, affected, airy, arrogant, authoritarian, big-headed, biggity, blustery, boastful, bombastic, buggish, cocky, complacent, conceited, disdainful, domineering, effete, egotistical, entitled, fey, flatulent, flaunting, full of oneself, gloaty, grandiose, hankty, haught, haughty, haut, high and mighty, high-handed, high-hat, highfalutin, hoity-toity, holier-than-thou, imperious, inflated, insolent, la-di-da, ostentatious, overbearing, overrefined, overweening, pansified, pompous, precious, presumptuous, pretentious, priggish, puffed up, recherché, sanctimonious, self-important, smug, snobbish, snooty, snotty, stagy, stilted, stout, stuck up, supercilious, theatrical, thrasonic, thrasonical, toploftical, toplofty, tumid, turgid, uppish, uppity, uppy, upstage, vain
Scrabble Score: 7
smug: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordsmug: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
smug: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary