[ 'bleɪt(ə)nt ]
■ adjective open and unashamed; flagrant.
Derivatives
blatancy noun
~ly adverb
Word History
The word ~ was first used by the poet Edmund Spenser in his romance The Faerie Queene (1596), in which he called a thousand-tongued monster produced by Cerberus and Chimaera the ~ beast . Spenser used the monster as a symbol of slander, and may have adopted the word ~ from Scots blatand 'bleating'. Blatant was subsequently used to mean 'loud and clamorous'; the sense 'unashamed, flagrant' arose in the late 19th century.