Pride Meaning: Healthy Pride, Harmful Pride and More

Every pride meaning in one list

1. Satisfaction. Pleasure in something done well, by you or by someone close to you. She felt pride when her daughter gave the speech.
2. Self-respect. Valuing yourself enough to refuse something beneath you. His pride would not let him beg.
3. Too high an opinion of yourself. Arrogance, vanity, refusing help or advice. Pride kept him from asking for directions.
4. A source of satisfaction. The person or thing you are proudest of. The rose garden is the pride of the street.
5. A group of lions. The animal sense, a family of lions living together.
6. Pride (capital P). Events, often in June, where LGBTQ people and supporters celebrate identity and equal rights.

To define pride correctly in any sentence, look at the context, which nearly always shows which one is intended. Words like swelled with or took point to the good sense; words like wounded, stubborn or false point to the harmful one.

Pride meaning in the Bible

Ask what does pride mean in the Bible, and the answer is mostly the harmful sense: trusting in yourself instead of God and looking down on others. The biblical definition of pride is close to arrogance and self-sufficiency, the attitude that says "I do not need anyone".

• Proverbs warns more than once that pride comes before a fall or destruction, and that wisdom goes with the humble (Proverbs 16:18 and 11:2).
• The New Testament letters of James and 1 Peter say that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5).
• Christian tradition later listed pride among the seven deadly sins, and many teachers called it the root of the others.

The Bible also uses the idea in a positive way, for example when Paul speaks of being proud of, or boasting about, the faith of the churches he cared for. So believers often separate sinful pride from honest gladness about good things. Our pages on humility, vanity and grace explore the same theme.

Healthy pride versus harmful pride

Examples in sentences

• Grandpa keeps his old tools polished; they are his pride and joy.
• I had to swallow my pride and ask my younger cousin to explain the app.
• The whole village took pride in the new library they built together.
• Her pride was hurt when nobody noticed the work she had put in.
• A pride of lions rested in the shade near the river.

Using pride as a verb, and its word family

As a verb, pride almost always appears as pride yourself on (or pride oneself on): to be especially pleased about a quality you have. The bakery prides itself on fresh bread every morning. Note the preposition is on or sometimes upon, not of.

• proud: feeling pride. We are proud of you.
• proudly: in a proud way. He proudly showed his certificate.
• prideful: full of the harmful kind of pride, a word heard often in religious speech.

Common phrases include take pride in, pride of place (the best, most visible position), wounded pride and false pride.

Word history

Pride is very old. Late Old English had pryde or pryte, formed from prud, the word that became proud. That adjective is generally traced to Old French, where a related word meant brave or worthy. In English, both the good and the bad senses appear early, which helps explain why the word still pulls in two directions.

The phrase "a pride of lions" is a later group name, one of many old English terms for groups of animals.

Pride meaning in English for learners

For learners, a simple rule helps. When pride is about something (pride in your work, pride in your city), it is usually positive. When pride is about yourself compared with others, it is usually negative. The adjective proud follows the same pattern: "proud of my son" is warm, while "too proud to apologize" is a criticism.

The people and feelings collection explains two close relatives, dignity and ego.