smarty-pants
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Rolling off the bed in a silicon sleep cocoon, Grace gradually evolves from a wriggling larval stage into a fully upright, walking and talking smarty-pants.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 18, 2026
Green’s characters are sweet, hyperverbal smarty-pants; they memorize poetry and say things like “I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.”
From The New Yorker • Nov. 30, 2018
Einstein, always the smarty-pants, outdid them both: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”
From The Guardian • Mar. 4, 2017
The book is “half-tell-all memoir, half-self-help manual,” all delivered in McHale’s signature, smarty-pants style.
From Seattle Times • Oct. 21, 2016
Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
