Other forms: vanities
Vanity is excessive pride in your own looks or importance. Pure vanity, wounded vanity, out of vanity.
It differs from confidence in being about appearances rather than ability. Vanity project is a scheme undertaken for the founder's glory; vanity publishing is paying to have your own book printed. A vanity is also a dressing table, and in a bathroom a vanity unit is the cabinet under the basin. Note that vanity in older writing means emptiness — vanity of vanities, all is vanity — which is the original sense.
1nounvanityExcessive pride in your own looks or importance.
“She checks herself in every mirror out of pure vanity.”
2nounemptinessEmptiness or futility, in older use.
“The whole sermon is about the vanity of everything they owned.”
vanity is excessive pride or emptiness.
Latin vanitas means emptiness, from vanus, empty — the same root as vain and vanish. Vanity was worthlessness before it was self-love, and the biblical vanity of vanities means all is empty rather than all is conceited.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁weh₂-
Latin
vānitas
Old French
vanité
Middle English
vanite
English, today
vanity
From va(i)n + ity, from Middle English vanite, from Old French vanité, from Latin vānitas, from vānus, whence English vain. a doublet of vanitas.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Big Ideas