self-dramatizing

[ self-dram-uh-tahy-zing, -drah-muh-, self- ]

adjective

1. exaggerating one's own qualities, role, situation, etc., for dramatic effect or as an attention-getting device; presenting oneself dramatically.

Other Words From

• self-drama·ti·zation noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of self-dramatizing¹

First recorded in 1935–40

Example Sentences

His stories had a self-dramatizing flair.

From Los Angeles Times

Katarina Joy Lopez takes on the most self-dramatizing of the characters, Austrian composer and author Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler’s former wife who later married Gropius in a tortured, ill-fated union.

From Los Angeles Times

The stars were married artists — the underground filmmakers Marie Menken and Willard Maas — and the concept was consistent with some Warhol films of the period: Set the camera in a fixed position; shoot two reels of 16-millimeter stock as the personalities in the frame engage in a mix of self-dramatizing and simply being; then let those two reels, totaling around 66 minutes, run unedited.

From New York Times

James Ijames’s Pulitzer-winning “Fat Ham,” for instance, has hung out its sign at Broadway’s American Airlines Theatre on West 42nd Street, inviting us to a raucous backyard party with a melancholy young man and his self-dramatizing family in North Carolina — or is it Elsinore?

From Washington Post

Something of a cross, in life and onscreen, between a scamp and an upright citizen, he has no problem with self-mockery, as in the great undersung sitcom “The Grinder,” in which he plays an unemployed, self-dramatizing actor who, having played a lawyer on television, believes he is one.

From Los Angeles Times