TAWDRY • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Tawdry

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/tˈɔdri/ Listen

adjective

Tawdry adj. (compar. tawdrier; superl. tawdriest)

Bought at the festival of St. Audrey. (Obs.) "And gird in your waist, For more fineness, with a tawdry lace."

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."

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Etymology of 'Tawdry'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Tawdry" Quotes from Famous Books

... which they lost at the gaming tables just as quickly. In the streets one rubbed elbows with denizens from every part of the solar system; many of them curiously not anthropomorphic. Glittering and painted purveyors of more tawdry and shopworn goods than mining equipment also made fortunes overnight, and some of them paid for their greedy snatching at luxury with their empty lives. Brawls were ...

— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen

... hurt, you cannot refrain from a thrill of annoyance that a country which has boasted in so loud-mouthed a way to Europe of having begun its national life by a wholesome scorn of all class distinction, should contain citizens cursed by a spirit of such tawdry pride. At least the aristocracies of other lands, vicious and reprehensible as they have always been, are yet an evil with a certain malign consistency for their support. Like those monarchies of which they have formed a piteous adjunct, they have always ...

— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... thoroughly interested. They quite simply adopt as their own, and imitate as best they can, all that they see there. In moments of genuine grief and excitement the words and the gestures they employ are those copied from the stage, and the tawdry expression often conflicts hideously with the fine and genuine emotion of which it is the ...

— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... chimed in with all that was best, as well as with much that was questionable, in the public mind. That men could be brothers; that they could live without the tawdry luxury, the tasteless and often brutal amusements, the low sensuality, the base intrigue, the bloody warfare, which was the accepted lot of the many; that they could find time to look stedfastly at heaven ...

— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... no more of the bread and cheese and onions, pot-house scores, and low company, with which you have so unceremoniously taxed our lordship. You will drive your jumped-up coach, with your awkward wives and dowdy daughters, and your tawdry liveries, all the way from Russell Square to the Green Park, to catch the chance of a glimpse of our lordship. You find out from our lordship's footman that our lordship wears a particular collar to his coat, and you will move ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

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