Sycophant vs Brownnose - What's the difference?
sycophant | brownnose |
One who uses obsequious compliments to gain self-serving favor or advantage from another; a servile flatterer.
* Dryden
One who seeks to gain through the powerful and influential.
(obsolete) An informer; a talebearer.
* Sir Philip Sidney
To inform against; hence, to calumniate.
* Milton
To play the sycophant toward; to flatter obsequiously.
(idiomatic) One who brownnoses; one who sucks up; a bootlicker, ass-kisser, sycophant.
* 1997 Ulrich Herbert, Hitler's foreign workers: enforced foreign labor in Germany under the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, p126
* 2007 Felicity Young, An Easeful Death, Fremantle Press, p13
* 2010 Joseph Morse, Gods of Ruin: A Political Thriller,'' p46
To flatter someone (especially a superior) in an obsequious manner, and to support their every opinion
As nouns the difference between sycophant and brownnose
is that sycophant is one who uses obsequious compliments to gain self-serving favor or advantage from another; a servile flatterer while brownnose is one who brownnoses; one who sucks up; a bootlicker, ass-kisser, sycophant.As verbs the difference between sycophant and brownnose
is that sycophant is to inform against; hence, to calumniate while brownnose is to flatter someone (especially a superior) in an obsequious manner, and to support their every opinion.sycophant
English
Noun
(en noun)- A sycophant will everything admire: / Each verse, each sentence, sets his soul on fire.
- Accusing sycophants , of all men, did best sort to his nature.
Synonyms
* (one who uses compliments to gain favor) ass-kisser, brown noser, suck up, yes man * (one who seeks to gain through the powerful) parasite, flunky, lackey * See alsoQuotations
{{timeline, 1700s=1775 1787, 1800s=1841 1863, 1900s=1927}} * 1775 — , No. 3 *: This language, “the imperial crown of Great Britain,” is not the style of the common law, but of court sycophants . * 1787 — *: They know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants , by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. * 1841 — , Ch. 43 *: this man, who has crawled and crept through life, wounding the hands he licked, and biting those he fawned upon: this sycophant , who never knew what honour, truth, or courage meant... * 1863 — , Book IX Ch. XI *: It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess. * 1927–29' — *: Princes were always at the mercy of others and ready to lend their ears to sycophants .Derived terms
(terms derived from sycophant) * sycophancy * sycophantic * sycophantish * sycophantismVerb
(en verb)- Sycophanting and misnaming the work of his adversary.
brownnose
English
Noun
- A workmate reported the matter, "which is why the worker threatened to beat up the latter," calling him a "brownnose " and threatening to "wipe the floor with him."
- 'I know, he's a natural brownnose . I guess he does have some talents.'
- You don't have to be such a brownnose , at least not to me.