self-complacentadj.

1736 Private Lett. adapted to Publick Use 24 It is competent and peculiar to the infinitely perfect Being to be self-complacent, his infinite Perfections, Self-Existence, and independence, makes him such.

1763 C. Churchill Rosciad in Poems I. 9 With a self-complacent jutting air, It smil'd, It smirk'd.

1849 T. B. Macaulay Hist. Eng. I. v. 543 Selfcomplacent stupidity.

1878 W. E. Gladstone Homer 148 The wisdom of Nestor is amusingly accompanied with self-complacent reflection.

1909 Daily Chron. 6 July 3/3 Man is still unredeemed and unrepentant, smug, self-complacent and misunderstanding.

1966 B. W. Downs Mod. Norwegian Lit. ii. 25 There is some mild humour at the expense of the heroine's self-complacent parents.

1997 Pacific Stars & Stripes 2 Nov. 23 He raps us on the skull, disturbing our self-complacent understanding of the world.

1772 Morning Chron. 23 July An anonymous scribbler..concluding self-complacently after all that he ‘is not conscious of having written any thing on the occasion, that should make me ashamed of the name of’—whom?

1805 J. Foster Essays I. i. iii. 45 As polemics most self-complacently avow their opinions to be more firmly established by all that the opponent has objected.

1920 Yale Rev. 9 380 New York City is self-complacently confident that the Hudson River is the western boundary of as much of the United States as matters.

2005 Furrow 56 635 Falsely constructed antitheses which self-complacently consign others to margins of ‘left’ or ‘right’.