flippant

Word origin

1595, from Northern English dialectal flippand (“prattling, babbling, glib”), present participle of flip (“to babble”), of North Germanic origin. Cognate with Icelandic fleipa (“to babble, prattle”), Swedish dialectal flepa (“to talk nonsense”). Alteration of -and suffix (a variant of the participial -ing) to -ant probably due to influence from words in -ant.

Used in a sentence

• “a sort of flippant, vain discourse”

• “The conversations had grown more adult over the years—she was less flippant, at least.”

• “In the mid-1950s we both wrote for the same weekly, where her contributions were a good deal more serious and less flippant than mine.”

Source: Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0