noun
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contrived but foolish talk
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insincere and pretentious talk
politicians' claptrap
Etymology
Origin of claptrap
Explanation
Use the word claptrap when you're talking about overblown nonsense. You might read your English professor's new book and secretly feel that it's nothing but claptrap. Writing that's grandiose or boastful is one kind of claptrap, and a ridiculous or absurd speech is another. Most claptrap involves ornate ways of talking or writing, involving rhetorical flourishes and a lack of deep meaning. The word comes from the idea of "a trick to 'catch' applause," and its meaning evolved to mean "showy, cheap talk" and also, to some degree, "nonsense."
Vocabulary lists containing claptrap
1984
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Projekt 1065
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True Grit
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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.
And even as I try to dress it up here with some kind of detached, anthropological pseudo-intellectual claptrap, I’m still jumping straight into the muddy pigpile that’s been going on for weeks.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 24, 2026
As I’ve reported, one of the nation’s most assiduous dispensers of anti-vaccine claptrap does so from an official perch.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 22, 2024
A public defender in Virginia said, "I have never heard of any of that claptrap in my jurisdiction."
From Salon • Jan. 1, 2023
With irritatingly detached narration from British actress Lesley Manville, we are asked to view Darby’s love life through a prism of statistics and quasi-scientific claptrap.
From Washington Post • May 26, 2020
His eyes were soft and irisless and brown, and suddenly I saw Roskus watching me from behind all his whitefolks’ claptrap of uniforms and politics and Harvard manner, diffident, secret, inarticulate and sad.
From "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner
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.
