Meaning and example
a person who tries to please someone in order to gain a personal advantage
The passage used "sycophant" to mean a person who tries to please someone in order to gain a personal advantage.
Plain-English interpretation
A prevalence score of 0.893 places sycophant in the uncommon range on this site. In practical terms, the word was recognized by about 81.7% of people in the source dataset.
Related words
No indexed related-word pages are available for this entry yet.
Similar-prevalence words
- Known by
- 81.7%
elaborately or excessively ornamented
- Known by
- 81.9%
(Greek mythology) the goddess of healing; daughter of Aesculapius and sister of Hygeia
- Known by
- 81.6%
marked by care and persistent effort
- Known by
- 82.3%
a loud harsh or strident noise
- Known by
- 82.3%
anything short-lived, as an insect that lives only for a day in its winged form
Source attribution
Brysbaert, M., Mandera, P., McCormick, S. F., & Keuleers, E. (2019). Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 51, 467-479.
Definitions and related terms are derived from WordNet. This page is part of the curated indexable word set.