smarty-pants
Americannoun
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He's just a smarty-pants, showing off for some girls.
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a smart person.
My kid is a super smarty-pants who continues to get 4s on her state exams.
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(used as a mildly abusive term of address or to refer to someone with contempt).
Who invited that smarty-pants--everyone hates her!
noun
Etymology
Origin of smarty-pants
First recorded in 1915–20
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
It’s a smarty-pants show, but it’s provocative rather than explosive, and these days, that’s a rare and wonderful feat.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 18, 2021
People always enjoy a critical savaging, and there’s satisfaction in seeing a smarty-pants taken down a peg.
From The Guardian ● Nov. 16, 2019
Green’s characters are sweet, hyperverbal smarty-pants; they memorize poetry and say things like “I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.”
From The New Yorker ● Nov. 30, 2018
But at the root of Jamison’s own grandiosity is not smarty-pants pretension; it’s a craving for emotional intensity that takes the form of an infatuation with pain.
From Slate ● Apr. 3, 2018
Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
