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Meretricious   Listen
adjective
Meretricious  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to prostitutes; having to do with harlots; lustful; as, meretricious traffic.
2.
Resembling the arts of a harlot; alluring by false show; gaudily and deceitfully ornamental; tawdry; as, meretricious dress or ornaments.
3.
Deceptive or based on deception; seeming plausible, but based on pretense or insincerity; deceptive; misleading; insincere; specious; as, meretricious arguments.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Meretricious" Quotes from Famous Books



... the one accepted an idle knighthood, and the other became a baron of the empire. The great men who went to their graves as Michael Faraday and George Grote seem to me to have understood the dignity of knowledge better when they declined all such meretricious trappings. [(On the other hand, he thought it right and proper for officials, in scientific as in other departments, to accept such honours, as giving them official power and status. In his own case, while refusing all simple titular honours, he accepted the Privy Councillorship, because, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass instead of a tenor. They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character. Arthur Updyke, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... has a certain meretricious beauty," I admitted. "Those red cushions and all that bright metal work give ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... all the building, the south transept, or Blandamer aisle, is constantly in clear daylight. Moreover, while the nave is of the Norman style, and the transepts and choir of the Early English, this window is of the latest Perpendicular, complicated in its scheme, and meretricious in the elaboration of its detail. The difference is so great as to force itself upon the attention even of those entirely unacquainted with architecture, and it has naturally more significance for the professional eye. Westray ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... profound respect for his companion. Aunt Chloe showed them effusively into her parlor, a small but scrupulously neat and sweet-smelling apartment, inordinately furnished with a huge mahogany centre-table and chairs, and the most fragile and meretricious china and glass ornaments on the mantel. But the three jasmine-edged lattice windows opened upon a homely garden of old-fashioned herbs and flowers, and their fragrance filled the room. The cleanest and starchiest of curtains, the most dazzling and whitest of tidies and chair-covers, ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte


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