ostentatious

US/ˌɒs.tɛnˈteɪ.ʃəs/

adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,666 of 15,258neutral

Ostentatious means showing off wealth or knowledge to be noticed. An ostentatious display, ostentatious generosity, less than ostentatious.

The point is the audience: ostentatious generosity is giving arranged to be seen, which is why the word can condemn a good act. It is always a criticism, and nobody has ever described their own behaviour this way.

Definitions of ostentatious

1adjectiveostentatiousShowing off wealth or knowledge to be noticed.C1
“They live in an ostentatious mansion with gold taps and marble statues.”

ostentatious is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin ostentare means to display, a frequentative of ostendere, to show — ob plus tendere, to stretch.

Originated 1590; from ostentātus + -ious.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

ostentatious in the wild

Two of these, Huis ten Bosch and Mauritshuis, are symmetrical blocks with large windows, stripped of ostentatious Baroque flourishes.
Dutch Baroque architecture
The patrons are perpetually distracted by people -- primarily women -- wearing large, ostentatious hats that obstruct everyone else's views of the screen.
Those Awful Hats
Swaggering is an ostentatious style of walking with an extravagant manner.
Swaggering
Stalin, the only person to ever hold this rank, soon came to regret accepting the title, viewing it as overly ostentatious.
Generalissimo of the Soviet Union

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.

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