Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In a gaudy and superficial manner.
  • Resembling tinsel; gaudy; showy and superficial.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Like tinsel; gaudy; showy, but cheap.
  • adverb In a showy and cheap manner.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Resembling or adorned with tinsel.
  • adjective Gaudy, superficial; offering attraction without depth.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective glittering with gold or silver

Etymologies

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Examples

  • If pavlova turns out not to have nestled comfortably among the whites or yellows, my second choice would be to assign pavlova to the palest of pinks or some kind of tinselly silver because what seems most surprising about surviving accounts of ballerina’s costume and toilette in the first J.C. Williamson season was the Argus critic’s references to that odd-sounding pink wig, and those slightly over-insistent touches of “silver tissue.”

    Further thoughts about “Pavlova” 2009

  • If pavlova turns out not to have nestled comfortably among the whites or yellows, my second choice would be to assign pavlova to the palest of pinks or some kind of tinselly silver because what seems most surprising about surviving accounts of ballerina’s costume and toilette in the first J.C. Williamson season was the Argus critic’s references to that odd-sounding pink wig, and those slightly over-insistent touches of “silver tissue.”

    Archive 2009-05-01 2009

  • She suspected, more often than not, that her "tinselly experiments" in fiction would be packed away with the rest of the artefacts and curiosities, all the minor efforts that occupy various archives and storage rooms.

    Virginia Woolf, my mother and me 2011

  • Both holidays in the U.S. now bear the taint of 'Xmasization,' for the bastardization of "Christmas," which gave us "Xmas," also turned the festival of Hanukkah -- a sweet, restrained, family celebration -- into a tinselly over-inflated Christmas wannabe.

    Michele Somerville: December Dilemma: Maccabees vs. The Elves Michele Somerville 2011

  • Both holidays in the U.S. now bear the taint of 'Xmasization,' for the bastardization of "Christmas," which gave us "Xmas," also turned the festival of Hanukkah -- a sweet, restrained, family celebration -- into a tinselly over-inflated Christmas wannabe.

    Michele Somerville: December Dilemma: Maccabees vs. The Elves Michele Somerville 2011

  • She suspected, more often than not, that her "tinselly experiments" in fiction would be packed away with the rest of the artefacts and curiosities, all the minor efforts that occupy various archives and storage rooms.

    Virginia Woolf, my mother and me 2011

  • Meanwhile more than 80% of the electorate wish to have the right to give or withhold their whole-hearted consent to the Constitutional Treaty Mark II which Vanity Blair may have left as a well-concealed booby trap in Downing Street for the man he and his tinselly, gimcrack wife love to hate.

    Labour Voters Begin to Desert Brown On Europe 2007

  • Her image adorns the walls of countless pious households and, although the aesthetic poverty of today's saccharine and tinselly Catholicism makes it easy to forget the fact, she has been the inspiration of some of the finest achievements of the human spirit: the cathedrals of Chartres and Strasbourg; the paintings of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and Velasquez; the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Yeats; the music of Palestrina.

    Attachments 2009

  • Meanwhile more than 80% of the electorate wish to have the right to give or withhold their whole-hearted consent to the Constitutional Treaty Mark II which Vanity Blair may have left as a well-concealed booby trap in Downing Street for the man he and his tinselly, gimcrack wife love to hate.

    Archive 2007-08-19 2007

  • For instance, even now that Fifth Avenue has nearly completed its evolution (or, some would say, decline) into its current tinselly condition (read "the home of more and more celebrities," but really read "the home of more and more Jews"), Central Park still represents an enormous social chasm, between the East Side (read "fewer Jews") and the West Side ( "more Jews").

    Eminent Domains 2005

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