Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A brief publicity notice, as on a book jacket.
Wiktionary
- n. A short description of a book, film, musical work, or other product written and used for promotional purposes.
- v. To write or quote something in a blurb
WordNet 3.0
- n. a promotional statement (as found on the dust jackets of books)
Etymologies
- Coined by Gelett Burgess (1866-1951), American humorist.
Examples
“The former Eurythmics singer has been nominated for the Barclays Woman of the Year Award, which according to the blurb is given each year to an exceptional woman whose personal and public life has been both brave and bold.”
The Guardian: Annie Lennox: 'I would have been perfect as a man'
“Gelett Burgess (1866 – 1951) coined both blurb and tintiddle, though blurb is sometimes attributed to Brander Matthews.”
“Here's the blurb from the Who is Jenna Fox website:”
Friday Book Club & Interview with Mary E. Pearson: The Adoration of Jenna Fox
“A blurb is kind of the best and worst of a situation don't ya think?”
“Great covers make me look twice and if the blurb is interesting I'll buy the book!”
“But this one had a blurb from the editor of ERB-dom.”
MIND MELD: Books That Hold Special Places in Our Hearts and On Our Shelves
“Your headline for this little blurb is misleading and bad reporting.”
Clinton: Vetting process for administration jobs 'a nightmare'
“Barth's blurb is dutifully included on the back cover of Michael Martone, an example of this book's playful charm but also clear enough warning that we should indeed take the blurb as a formulaic "genre" that ought not to be taken seriously as literary criticism.”
“Interesting blurb from the NY Times Sunday Magazine about Georgia based polling firm Strategic Vision's alleged propensity for making stuff up.”
“Here's the blurb from the promo material from the book ...”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘blurb’.
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onomatopoeias (1 syllable)
1 syllable words that mean what they sound like. (dictionaried or un-dictionaried words | onomatopoeic in nature)
onomatopoeias (2 syllable) | onomatopoeias (3+ syllables)gush, buzz, pop, woof, boo, bam, bang, bash, bump, clang, clap, click and 86 more...
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What A Wonderful Word
Some of my favorite words, purely because of the way they sound and feel as you say them
knitandpurl David Crystal writes about the origin of blurb in By Hook or By Crook. Crystal tells the Gelett Burgess story and writes: "In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, he defined his own term:
1 A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.
2 Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher."
(Crystal, p 25)
I like the second one! Dec 15, 2008
oroboros According to Wikipedia entry under "Gelett Burgess":
The word "blurb", meaning a short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes, was coined by Burgess in 1907, in attributing the cover copy of his book, Are You a Bromide?, to a Miss Belinda Blurb. His definition of "blurb" is "a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial". Jun 19, 2007
sonofgroucho Apparently, the first recorded use of this word was in 1907 in an American comic book. The cover featured a buxom young lady with the name Miss Blinda Blurb. Blurb became the term for the eye-catching advertisement on a book jacket. Feb 8, 2007
seanahan Would you use this interchangably with précis? I'm fine with having an English version of a French word that almost nobody will be able to pronounce correctly, but blurb is a little too prosaic. Dec 2, 2006
quotato sounds like suburb, or worse yet, sub-blurb Dec 2, 2006
dbmag9 Modern life is one short bite-sized piece of information after another. The internet, symbol of the age, is designed to actively fire information at our passive eyes. Yet more so the television. On the back of books, those edifices which we once thought would weather the storm of the information age, are those brief, digestible, active and aggresive things which sum this whole sorry state up. Dec 2, 2006