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Bombast vs Tympany - What's the difference?

bombast | tympany |

As nouns the difference between bombast and tympany

is that bombast is originally, cotton, or cotton wool while tympany is the sound made by beating a drum.

As a verb bombast

is to swell or fill out; to pad; to inflate.

As an adjective bombast

is high-sounding; inflated; big without meaning; magniloquent; bombastic.

bombast

English

Noun

  • Originally, cotton, or cotton wool.
  • * Lupton
    • a candle with a wick of bombast
  • Cotton, or any soft, fibrous material, used as stuffing for garments; stuffing; padding.
  • * Shakespeare
    • How now, my sweet creature of bombast !
  • * Stubbes
    • doublets, stuffed with four, five, or six pounds of bombast at least
  • (figuratively) High-sounding words; a pompous or ostentatious manner of writing or speaking; language above the dignity of the occasion.
  • * Dryden
    • Yet noisy bombast carefully avoid.
  • *

    • Synonyms

    * (cotton or cotton wool) fustian * (high-sounding words) bombard phrase (obs.) , fustian, grandiloquence

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • To swell or fill out; to pad; to inflate.
  • * {{quote-book, year=1839, author=Samuel Taylor Coleridge, title=Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4., chapter=, edition= citation
    • , passage=Ib. Their doctrine is to be seen in Jacob Behmen's books by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms. }}

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • High-sounding; inflated; big without meaning; magniloquent; bombastic.
  • * Shakespeare
    • [He] evades them with a bombast circumstance, / Horribly stuffed with epithets of war.
  • * Cowley
    • Nor a tall metaphor in bombast way.

    tympany

    English

    Noun

    (tympanies)
  • The sound made by beating a drum.
  • (medicine) (distention of the abdomen).
  • Inflation; conceit; bombast; turgidness.
    • Thine 's a tympany of sense. — Dryden.
    (De Quincey)