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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Ostentation \Os'ten*ta"tion\, noun [L. ostentatio: cf. F. ostentation.]
1. The act of ostentating or of making an ambitious display; unnecessary show; pretentious parade; -- usually in a detractive sense. ''Much ostentation vain of fleshly arm.'' --Milton.
He knew that good and bountiful minds were sometimes inclined to ostentation. --Atterbury.
2. A show or spectacle. [Obs.] --Shak.
Syn: Parade; pageantry; show; pomp; pompousness; vaunting; boasting. See {Parade}.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
ostentation
noun
1: a showy outward display [syn: {fanfare}]
2: lack of elegance as a consequence of being pompous and puffed up with vanity [syn: {ostentatiousness}, {pomposity}, {pompousness}, {pretentiousness}, {splashiness}, {inflation}]
3: pretentious or showy or vulgar display
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
162 Moby Thesaurus words for "ostentation": Barnumism, acting, affectation, appearance, arabesque, arrantness, attitudinizing, baroque, baroqueness, bedizenment, big talk, blatancy, bluff, bluffing, boldness, cheating, chinoiserie, color, coloring, conspicuousness, convolution, deception, delusion, demonstration, disguise, display, dissemblance, dissembling, dissimulation, elaborateness, elegance, enactment, exhibit, exhibition, exhibitionism, exposition, exposure, facade, face, fakery, faking, false air, false front, false show, falsity, fanciness, feigning, feint, fineness, flagrance, flagrancy, flamboyance, flashiness, flatulence, flatulency, flaunting, floridity, floridness, flourish, floweriness, four-flushing, fraud, front, fulsomeness, garishness, gaudiness, gilt, gloss, grandiloquence, grandioseness, grandiosity, high relief, high-flown diction, humbug, humbuggery, imposture, inflatedness, inflation, lexiphanicism, loftiness, luridness, luxuriance, luxuriousness, magniloquence, masquerade, mere rhetoric, meretriciousness, moresque, noticeability, notoriety, notoriousness, obtrusiveness, opening, orotundity, ostentatious complexity, outstandingness, outward show, overelaborateness, overelegance, overornamentation, parade, performance, platitudinous ponderosity, playacting, polysyllabic profundity, pomposity, pompous prolixity, pompousness, pontification, pose, posing, posture, presentation, presentment, pretense, pretension, pretentiousness, pretext, production, projection, prominence, pronouncedness, prose run mad, representation, retrospective, rhetoric, rhetoricalness, richness, rococo, salience, saliency, seeming, semblance, sensationalism, sententiousness, sham, show, showiness, showing, simulacrum, simulation, speciousness, stiltedness, strikingness, strong relief, swelling utterance, swollen phrase, swollenness, tall talk, tortuosity, tortuousness, tumidity, tumidness, turgescence, turgidity, unfolding, unfoldment, unveiling, varnish, varnishing day, vernissage, window dressing
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