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flagrant

UK/ˈfleɪ.ɡɹənt/US/ˈfleɪ.ɡɹənt/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,163 of 15,258neutral

Flagrant means openly and shockingly wrong. A flagrant breach, flagrant disregard, flagrantly unfair.

The openness is the point: a flagrant violation is one nobody troubled to hide, which makes it worse rather than better. It is not the same word as fragrant, which means sweet-smelling, and the two are swapped in writing constantly.

Definitions of flagrant

  1. 1adjectiveflagrantOpenly and shockingly wrong.C1

    “The referee sent him off for a flagrant foul on the goalkeeper.”

flagrant is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin flagrans means blazing, from flagrare, to burn. Conflagration is a relative.

  1. Latin

    flagrantem

  2. Middle French

    flagrant

  3. English, today

    flagrant

Built from

  • flagrare · Latin — blaze, burn

From Middle French flagrant, from Latin flagrantem, present participle of flagrare (“blaze, burn”). More at black.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

flagrant in the wild

  • In addition, any single flagrant technical foul, or a disqualifying foul in FIBA and NCAA women's play, incurs ejection.

    Technical foul

  • Collier ended the flagrant abuse of inmates under the trusty system and other prison abuses that had continued essentially unchanged since the building of the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

    Trusty system (prison)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.