These words are used to describe styles of speaking or writing. Bombastic and turgid are alike in designating a lack of restraint and discipline that so inflates the language used in a piece of writing or in a speech that its style and content are thrown out of balance. Bombastic is derived from the noun bombast which originally denoted the kind of cotton, wool or other soft material which is used for padding and stuffing. The suggestion of padding is very much present in any reference to a bombastic style which, though it does not always connote the complete absence of thought, certainly indicates an imbalance between the thought and the manner used to express it: For so trivial a topic, his speech was bombastic and cheaply theatrical. Turgid literally means swollen or distended, as by contained air or liquid: a healthy, turgid muscle; a leg turgid with infection. Like bombastic , turgid carries over a suggestion of its literal meaning into its figurative reference to style: a tiny idea which the author has blown up into this turgid , trying novel. Orotund is used positively to describe a full, clear, round and resonant tone of voice. The figurative sense of the word, however, is pejorative in its synonymity with bombastic . Orotund can apply to pompous, inflated speech or writing, but, because of its particular reference to sound, it is most often used to describe the spoken word: a speech so orotund as to cause yawns and whispers all over the auditorium. Purple , in the sense being compared here, means ornate or flowery. It is pejorative in its suggestion of too much colour and showiness: a good playwright who ruined some of his most dramatic moments with passages of bad poetry and purple prose. It also has come to refer to the erotic, the lurid, the vulgar or the profane: a TV compere whose interviews led to such purple exchanges that a sponsor demanded his dismissal.