blatant [L16th] A word first used by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) in The Faerie Queene (1596) as a description of a thousand-tongued monster, offspring of the three-headed dog Cerberus and the fire-breathing Chimera. Spenser used this monster as a symbol of slander, and called it ‘the blatant beast’. He may just have invented the word, or taken it from Scots blatand ‘bleating’. Blatant was subsequently used to mean ‘clamorous, offensive to the ear’ [M17th], and did not take on its modern meaning ‘unashamedly conspicuous’ until the late 19th century.