The word blatant was first used by the poet Edmund Spenser in his romance The Faerie Queene (1596), in which he called a thousand-tongued monster produced by Cerberus and Chimaera the blatant beast. Spenser used the monster as a symbol of slander, and may have adopted the word blatant from Scots blatand ‘bleating’. Blatant was subsequently used to mean ‘loud and clamorous’; the sense ‘unashamed, flagrant’ arose in the late 19th century.