Excessive pride, arrogance, or overconfidence that oversteps proper limits and invites downfall..
Excessive pride, arrogance, or overconfidence that oversteps proper limits and invites downfall.
Excessive pride shading into arrogance, with a strong sense of overreach that courts ruin — essentially always negative and more dangerous than ordinary conceit. Its distinguishing flavor is the classical-tragic association: in Greek tragedy, hubris drove a hero past the bounds set for mortals to claim a standing fit for gods, calling down retribution. Modern usage keeps the comeuppance overtone (the Titanic as “a cautionary tale about hubris”); the most literary of the four.
From Greek hybris “wanton violence, insolence, outrage,” originally “presumption toward the gods.” The English back-formation dates to 1884.
A relatively recent borrowing (1884) that revived the ancient Greek concept along with the term; the meaning has stayed close to the Greek (presumptuous overconfidence that courts downfall) and broadened to general arrogance/overreach. No reliable recent-generation shift.