Brazen means bold and shameless. A brazen lie, brazen it out, brazen cheek.
To brazen it out is to carry on as though nothing were wrong when everybody knows otherwise, which is the word's most useful phrase. The original meaning was made of brass, and the modern sense comes from the idea of a face as hard as metal.
1adjectivebrazenBold and shameless.
“In a brazen robbery, thieves stole jewellery from the shop in broad daylight.”
brazen is a quality.
Old English braesen means made of brass, from braes, brass. The shameless sense came from a face of brass.
Old English
bræsen — brazen, of brass
Middle English
brasen
English, today
brazen
Built from
From Middle English brasen, from Old English bræsen (“brazen, of brass”); equivalent to brass + en (compare golden, wooden, etc.). The word originally meant “of brass”; the figurative verb sense (as in brazen it out (“face impudently”)) dates from the 1550s (perhaps evoking the sense “face like brass, unmoving and not showing shame”), and the adjective sense “impudent” from the 1570s. Compare brass neck, bold as brass.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA