A sycophant is a servile, self-seeking flatterer — someone who praises and defers to a powerful person in order to extract advantage from proximity to them.
The word is defined by motive rather than manner. 📝Obsequious attentiveness and 📝servile agreement are the visible behavior; what makes it sycophancy is that the deference is instrumental. The practical consequence is informational: a sycophant's agreement tracks the powerful person's position rather than the facts, so the flattered party progressively loses access to correction — which is why the term recurs in accounts of courts, boardrooms, and political inner circles. It is distinct from 📝fawning, the trauma response, where the same appeasing behavior is driven by fear of conflict rather than by hope of gain; the conduct can look identical while the motive is inverted.
First attested in English in 1537, the word came through Latin sycophanta, "informer, trickster," from Ancient Greek sykophantēs, literally "fig-shower," from sykon ("fig") and phainein ("to show"). In classical Athens a sykophantes was a professional accuser who brought vexatious prosecutions for personal profit — an informer rather than a flatterer, a sense English carried for a time and has since dropped. Why a "fig-shower" should have meant an informer is not settled; the familiar explanations, involving the denunciation of fig smugglers or an obscene hand gesture, are folk accounts that lexicographers treat as unverified. The abstract noun sycophancy has more recently been adopted in artificial-intelligence research to name a parallel failure in language models trained on human approval: agreeing with the user instead of correcting them.