Other forms: boasts, boasted, boasting
To boast is to tell people how good you are, and then tell them again. The man at the party who works his salary into the second sentence. A child boasting about a new bike. A neighbour who mentions the car three times in one conversation.
Boast is not a neutral word — it says the speaker went too far, which is why it is what you call other people's pride and rarely your own. It takes about: boast about your results, boast about a win. It also runs into a that-clause: he boasted that he had never lost a game. Then there is a second sense with no shame in it at all, used of places and things — the hotel boasts three pools, the town boasts the oldest bridge in the country. There, boasts simply means has, and what follows is meant to impress. The noun is a boast, the adjective is boastful, and brag is the informal twin.
1verbboastTo talk with too much pride about what you have or what you have done.~37%
“He boasted about his results all afternoon.”
2verbplaceOf a place or a thing: to have something worth being proud of.~27%
“The school boasts a swimming pool and two gyms.”
3nounstatementA statement in which somebody praises themselves.~36%
“It turned out to be an empty boast.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: brag, show off
BOAST → TOAST
A man stands on his chair holding up one slice of toast for the whole room to see. He has said four times that he made it himself, and each time he says it the toast in his hand grows another inch.
hooks ontotoast
Middle English bost covered boasting, glory, noise, arrogance, pride and vanity all at once, and behind it stands Proto-Germanic *bausuz — inflated, swollen, puffed up. That is the picture the word was built on. A boaster is not tall; he is blown up like a paper bag.
Proto-Germanic
*bausuz — inflated, swollen, puffed up, proud, arrogant, bad
Middle English
bosten
English, today
boast
Built from
From Middle English bosten, from bost (“boast, glory, noise, arrogance, presumption, pride, vanity”), probably of gmq origin, ultimately from Proto-Germanic bausuz (“inflated, swollen, puffed up, proud, arrogant, bad”). Cognate with Scots bost, boist (“to threaten, brag, boast”), Anglo-Norman bost (“ostentation”) (from gem). Related to Norwegian baus (“proud, bold, daring”), dialectal German baustern (“to swell”), German böse (“evil, bad, angry”), Dutch boos (“evil, wicked, angry”), West Frisian boas (“bad, wicked, angry, shrewd, clever”). Compare also dialectal Norwegian - bausta, busta (“to rush onward, make a noise”). Possible a doublet of boost. Compare typologically puffy, напы́щенный, наду́тый.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA