sycophancy

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — sycophant sits at #13,586neutral

Sycophancy is flattering the powerful to gain advantage. Sickening sycophancy.

It works often enough to keep everybody at it, which is the depressing part. Sycophancy is obvious to everybody in the room except the person being flattered.

Definitions of sycophancy

1nounsycophancyFlattering the powerful to gain advantage.C2
“The sycophancy at that table was hard to watch.”

sycophancy is a behaviour.

Where it comes from

Greek sykophantes, literally a fig-shower, whose original sense is lost; in Athens it meant an informer.

Ancient Greek
σῡκοφᾰντῐ́ᾱ
Latin
sȳcophantia
English, today
sycophancy

From Latin sȳcophantia, from Ancient Greek σῡκοφᾰντῐ́ᾱ, equivalent to sycophant + -cy.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

sycophancy in the wild

In modern English, sycophant denotes an insincere flatterer and refers to someone practising sycophancy (i.e., insincere flattery to gain an advantage).
Sycophancy
The poems deal with diverse themes like political opportunism and sycophancy, war, the paradox of God and the richness and beauty of nature.
Building the Nation and Other Poems
Later work documented sycophancy in mathematics, medicine, academic peer review and other domains, and identified a broader category called "social sycophancy" affecting an assistant's emotional and interpersonal responses.
Sycophancy (artificial intelligence)

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.

Related words

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