blown-up

Word family

• blow up
  phrasal verbB1

Synonym discussion

Sense: adjective/3

These words all describe making something seem larger or more important than it is, but they differ in tone and focus. 'Exaggerated' is the most neutral and widely used — anyone can exaggerate a story or a detail without necessarily intending harm. 'Overblown' carries a critical edge, suggesting something is not just bigger than reality but also pretentious or self-important (an overblown speech, an overblown sense of one's talent). 'Inflated' often appears with numbers and values — inflated prices, inflated claims, inflated egos — and implies artificial enlargement beyond what is natural or deserved. 'Overstated' is the mildest, used when someone simply made a point too strongly. A 'blown-up' account differs from all of these: it specifically evokes the image of something that has been exploded in scale, as if a small firecracker were treated like a bomb. For example: 'The argument was exaggerated' (made bigger), 'His reputation is overblown' (pretentious), 'The figures were inflated' (artificially raised), 'The risks were overstated' (too strongly put), but 'The blown-up scandal filled the front pages' (exploded out of all proportion).

Common collocations

Etymology

From the past participle of the phrasal verb 'blow up', which combines 'blow' (from Old English 'blāwan', meaning to move air) with 'up' to mean 'explode or inflate'. The literal adjectival sense — something destroyed by explosion — appeared in the early 19th century. The photographic sense (enlarging an image) followed in the early 20th century as photography became widespread. The figurative sense of exaggerating and the humorous sense of feeling swollen from overeating are both 20th-century extensions, playing on the same idea of making something unnaturally larger.