How to Use highfalutin in a Sentence

highfalutin

adjective
  • Both film and suite balance highfalutin glory and deep, deep rot.
    — Hannah Edgar, Chicago Tribune, 9 Nov. 2024
  • Anything else is just highfalutin’, and granny would not approve.
    — Amber Sutton, al, 29 June 2022
  • In a sense, this highfalutin hypocrisy and lack of principle is the point of Bagehot.
    — John Lanchester, The New Yorker, 29 July 2019
  • Her voice was as engaging and charming as her ex-husband’s was abstruse and highfalutin.
    — Penelope Green, New York Times, 7 Dec. 2023
  • Whitmer makes her case in less than 160 pages with almost no highfalutin language.
    — Amanda Uhle, Washington Post, 9 July 2024
  • His affected, highfalutin accent is from his father; the fluid agony in his limbs is from his mother.
    — Dan Piepenbring, Harper's Magazine, 7 Jan. 2022
  • Don’t expect the pair to celebrate either milestone with a highfalutin meal, though.
    — Chris Morris, Fortune, 30 Aug. 2023
  • If that’s not true, BYU’s chances for anything highfalutin this season are dead, mostly dead.
    — Gordon Monson, The Salt Lake Tribune, 18 Sep. 2022
  • In recent years, Alabama has embraced this highfalutin brand of football.
    — Rainer Sabin, AL.com, 29 Aug. 2017
  • Their brash energy counts for a lot, and in horror movies, especially, too much highfalutin artiness can just end up being a chill-killer.
    — Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 7 June 2018
  • In space, with one’s life and perhaps mankind’s existence on the line, survival might just come down to who can best wield a kitchen knife or random tool rather than some highfalutin laser.
    — Brian Truitt, USA TODAY, 17 Jan. 2024
  • Cage asks, repeating the absurd gesture Paul makes of miming drinking wine at a highfalutin dinner.
    — Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times, 2 Jan. 2024
  • If this sounds a little highfalutin, the film manages to pull it off with its examination of trust, isolation, and instinct.
    — Entertainment Weekly, 10 Mar. 2026
  • Apart from a few lingering entries in the sport sedan segment, there aren’t really any stick-shift cars out there with highfalutin aspirations.
    — Byron Hurd, The Drive, 18 June 2026
  • All of these really highfalutin figures look back on their time as fast-food employees as kind of character-building weigh stations on their way to success.
    — Rachel Sugar, Vox, 26 June 2019
  • Remember that scene where Batman cut a bullet out of a wall and used some highfalutin computer program to recreate the fingerprint on it?
    — Jason Parham, WIRED, 21 June 2018
  • In less highfalutin language, increasing taxes on an activity leads to less of it; cutting taxes on an activity leads to more of it.
    — Star Tribune, 30 Jan. 2021
  • The fashionableness of this highfalutin form of fascism might seem, at first, wildly alien from American issues or problems.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 30 Mar. 2017
  • So that was probably my main contribution, was to bring everything to a screeching halt with my ridiculous, highfalutin ideas about consciousness.
    — Geek's Guide To The Galaxy, WIRED, 30 Sep. 2017
  • Despite the highfalutin framing, the only part of X described above that is not already in some way a part of Twitter, is a means of making payments.
    — Brian Merchant, Los Angeles Times, 26 July 2023
  • Early on, Feld became Chicago’s most divisive restaurant, a flash point for critics of highfalutin many-course tasting menus.
    — The Bon Appétit Staff, Bon Appetit Magazine, 12 Sep. 2025
  • The resulting public mockery has forced the company to make sweaty apologies while standing by its highfalutin claims about the bot’s capabilities.
    — Allison Morrow, CNN Money, 14 Aug. 2025
  • If that was too highfalutin’, slices of Domino’s pizza circulated in custom slice boxes emblazoned with its logo.
    — Benjamin Svetkey, HollywoodReporter, 16 Mar. 2026
  • The way his vivid, relatable characters discuss the big questions, with so much soul and hang-looseness, free from any highfalutin airs, has long been something of a north star for me as a movie lover and as a talker.
    — David Marchese, New York Times, 1 June 2024
  • But after some highfalutin remarks, Crowe makes a hard turn to a profane, confrontational rant pitching his movie about a homicidal maniac.
    — Ryan Faughnder, chicagotribune.com, 22 Aug. 2020
  • Newsom, for all his highfalutin rhetoric about championing all Californians, just can’t quit the gentry and the insiders who have made his career.
    — Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times, 3 Oct. 2024
  • Most important to Mongers' co-founders, though, was to reimagine the highfalutin nature of wine, cheese and other delicacies into a format that is laid back.
    — Detroit Free Press, 6 Mar. 2024
  • The steering, chassis control, and those big, grippy tires let the Hyundai hustle through curves with grace and serenity—at speeds that would challenge several highfalutin’ sports sedans.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 22 Apr. 2023
  • Head to Bistro Dukes'—an upscale, but not highfalutin affair—for a refined take on classic Belgian fare, like crispy pheasant croquettes, served in a tart cranberry gel.
    — Condé Nast Traveler, 20 Oct. 2017
  • Techno doesn’t need to be cosigned by highfalutin institutions to validate its importance, but Versus is the kind of work that demands a nod even from folks who might not have deigned to acknowledge the genre before.
    — Leor Galil, Chicago Reader, 31 Aug. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'highfalutin.' 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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