Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Tawdry   /tˈɔdri/   Listen
adjective
Tawdry  adj.  (compar. tawdrier; superl. tawdriest)  
1.
Bought at the festival of St. Audrey. (Obs.) "And gird in your waist, For more fineness, with a tawdry lace."
2.
Very fine and showy in colors, without taste or elegance; having an excess of showy ornaments without grace; cheap and gaudy; as, a tawdry dress; tawdry feathers; tawdry colors. "He rails from morning to night at essenced fops and tawdry courtiers."



noun
Tawdry  n.  (pl. tawdries)  A necklace of a rural fashion, bought at St. Audrey's fair; hence, a necklace in general. (Obs.) "Of which the Naiads and the blue Nereids make Them tawdries for their necks."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Tawdry" Quotes from Famous Books



... a new dancer at the Opera, and the fame of Paul Zouche, were the chief topics of 'Society' outside its own tawdry personal concern; but under all the light froth and spume of the pleasure-seeking, pleasure-loving whirl of fashion, a fierce tempest was rising, and the first whistlings of the wind of revolt were already beginning to pierce through ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... Sand, and Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... Mrs. Brinkley to herself, "then you know I don't like you, and you'll use me in one way, if you can't in another. Very well!" But she found the girl's trust touching somehow, though the sentimentality of her appeal seemed as tawdry as ever. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... had been essential in every hat that went from Brandywine & Plummer's millinery department; and Gabriella, deriving from a mother who worked only in fine linen, rejected instinctively the cheap, the tawdry, and the inferior. She had heard a customer complain one day of the quality of the velvet on a hat Madame had made to order; and pausing to look at the material as she went out, she had decided that the most prosperous house in New York could not ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... silver, with pillars of the same metal; the two pulpits, with their stairs, are also covered with silver; and the general ornaments, though numerous and rich, are disposed with good taste, are kept in order, and have nothing tawdry or loaded in their general effect. The choir itself is extremely beautiful; so also is the carved screen before the organ, the doors of the first being of solid silver, and those of the other of richly-carved wood. There is also ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca


More quotes...



Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com