How to Use self-congratulatory in a Sentence

self-congratulatory

adjective
  • Some of the offerings are short and the site itself is self-congratulatory, but after more than 100 years of shows that iconic amphitheater to the north of us has earned the right to brag.
    David L. Coddoncontributor, San Diego Union-Tribune, 2 Mar. 2023
  • Only this episode is more than an hour long, the stories are fanciful at best and self-congratulatory at worst.
    Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY, 10 May 2023
  • Still, the general tone was self-congratulatory, and spilled over into the main order of business, the bestowing of awards.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 11 Mar. 2024
  • Owens trots out replicas of the awards and places them onstage, little self-congratulatory bits that do not enhance the performance.
    Peter Marks, Washington Post, 29 Sep. 2023
  • When the light of her self-congratulatory heroism fades, however, her reflexive move is to try to coax a stranger’s dog into attacking her own neck.
    Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times, 14 Apr. 2023
  • Leftist slogans about hate are naught but smug, self-congratulatory moral preening.
    Noah Rothman, National Review, 10 Nov. 2023
  • The exhibition warrant is not touted in any wall texts, either exhorting or self-congratulatory; it’s just done.
    Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 5 Sep. 2023
  • The self-congratulatory Beatles covers album is its own strange subgenre of bad soundtracks.
    Stephen Deusner, SPIN, 22 Jan. 2024
  • The governor’s annual State of the State speech, which formally kicks off the 60-day legislative session, has traditionally been both a self-congratulatory look back and a table-setting talk that sets the agenda for the challenges ahead.
    Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Sun Sentinel, 9 Jan. 2024
  • Trump’s first trade war hurt overall U.S. economic performance, contrary to the candidate’s self-congratulatory claims.
    Robert Goulder, Forbes, 12 Feb. 2024
  • The directors preside over a competent, energetic yet somehow stylistically uninspired package whose flourishes tend to be of a cutesy, self-congratulatory nature.
    Dennis Harvey, Variety, 26 May 2023
  • Its status as the looser and visibly inebriated younger cousin of the Oscars offered a counterweight to the self-serious, self-congratulatory exercise of the film academy’s annual ceremony and the seemingly endless parade of precursor events.
    Ryan Faughnder, Los Angeles Times, 9 Jan. 2024
  • Dissenters crashing the party of self-congratulatory agreement can be ostracized as troublemakers or malcontents.
    Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Fortune, 3 Apr. 2023
  • Nature has always humiliated the self-congratulatory scientist.
    Clare Egan, Longreads, 21 Mar. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'self-congratulatory.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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