Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
a. Claimed by the recipient, as a title one given to oneself.
WordNet
adj. as claimed by and for yourself often without justification; "the self-styled `doctor' has no degree of any kind" [syn: soi-disant]
Usage examples of "self-styled".
Palazzo Muti, Roman residence of the self-styled King James III of England and VIII of Scotland, was a handsomely columned and pedimented gold-stuccoed building at the northern end of the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, close to the heart of the old city.
It is a long dialogue between self-styled disincarnated spirits and Stainton Moses.
There was a knock at my door, and the self-styled Count Alfani went away without giving me the trouble of repeating my order.
Crude brawlers, these self-styled cantrev lords are unfit to command even their own households.
As for the self-styled Chevalier Stuard, I did not trouble my head whether he were her husband or her lover.
Self-styled parapsychologists have woven all kinds of fantasies around this apparition.
Ironically, regular church-going, middle-class Americans are far more cosmopolitan than the self-styled sophisticates of the left.
Like newborn moons of war they blinked into view far above the dead world of the self-styled Gods of Axone-Neurone.
All the self-styled Harvard cognoscenti assembled in Radcliffe's Agassiz Theater to sit in judgment on Maria Pastore's choreography and Daniel Rossi's score.
The apathy of the craftsmen, the decaying farmholds, even the green-etched stones of the Hold infuriated Fax, self-styled Lord of the High Reaches, to the point where he preferred to forget the reason he had sub jugated the once proud and profitable Hold.
And at the height of the Middle Ages, under the mighty Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), the flashing of Peter's zealous weapon attained to a blazing climax in the crackling fires of the Albigensian Crusade — where the people going up in flames were the heretic Cathari, the self-styled Pure Ones, who had explicitly rejected the sword for lives of ascetic purity in peace.
And at the height of the Middle Ages, under the mighty Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), the flashing of Peter's zealous weapon attained to a blazing climax in the crackling fires of the Albigensian Crusade -- where the people going up in flames were the heretic Cathari, the self-styled Pure Ones, who had explicitly rejected the sword for lives of ascetic purity in peace.
If I live to be a hundred I will never understand how nice gals from gentle homes manage to pass up all the nice young neighborhood gents in favor of some weak-chinned self-styled roughneck calling himself Ace, Duke, or Frenchy.
Cams scraped his chin with fingers still sticky from the honey harvest and regarded the self-styled wizard thoughtfully.
Behind its facade of indignation and righteousness, the line she had forced herself to listen to was, like so many philosophies that she had heard from other misfits and self-styled iconoclasts, really nothing more than a massive exercise in self-justification.