Other forms: proclaimed, proclaiming, proclaims
To proclaim something is to announce it out loud and in public, so that nobody can miss it. A herald reading out that the war is over; a country proclaiming its independence from a balcony.
The word carries ceremony. You proclaim independence, proclaim a national holiday, proclaim someone king. It also does confident personal announcements: he proclaimed himself the best cook in the family — and that is where self-proclaimed expert comes from, a phrase that is nearly always dry. Things can proclaim without speaking: the dust on every surface proclaimed that nobody had been home for weeks. The noun is proclamation. Do not reach for it in ordinary life; you announce that dinner is ready, you do not proclaim it.
1verbproclaimTo announce something publicly and officially.~90%
“The government proclaimed a day of national mourning.”
2verbspeechTo state something loudly and with great confidence.~8%
“He proclaimed the meal a triumph before anyone had tasted it.”
3verbshowTo show something clearly without any words.~2%
“The empty shelves proclaimed that the shop was finished.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: declare
Proclaim goes back to Latin proclamo, made of prō-, forth, and clāmō, to shout or cry out — to shout something forward, into the open. It reached English through Old French proclamer, and the spelling was later pulled towards claim, which is the same Latin shout arriving by another road.
Proto-Indo-European
*per-
Latin
proclamo
Old French
proclamer
Middle English
proclamen
English, today
proclaim
Built from
From Middle English proclamen, proclaime, from Old French proclamer, from Latin proclamo, from prō- (“forth”) + clāmō (“to shout, cry out”). Spelling altered by influence of claim, from the same Latin source (clāmō).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA