Stylish means dressed or designed with elegant good taste. A stylish coat, stylish and simple, look stylish.
It praises the judgement rather than the expense — stylish is not the same as expensive, and the whole point of the word is that it need not be. It applies to clothes, rooms, cars and prose. Note stylishly; and the difference from fashionable, which means current: something fashionable dates and something stylish is meant not to.
1adjectivestylishDressed or designed with elegant good taste.
“She always looks stylish, even in jeans and a plain T-shirt.”
stylish is a quality of good taste.
Also accepted in games: fashionable, chic
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)teyg- — to be sharp; to pierce, prick, puncture, stab; to goad
Latin
stilus — pointed instrument; writing tool; composition; characteristic mode of expression; stem of a plant
Medieval Latin
stylus
Old French
estile
Middle English
stile — writing tool; piece of written work; characteristic mode of expression; demeanour; person's designation or title; stem of a plant; period of time
English
style
English, today
stylish
Built from
From style + -ish. style The noun is derived from Middle English stile (“writing tool; piece of written work; characteristic mode of expression; demeanour; person's designation or title; stem of a plant; period of time”) (compare semantic development to по́черк (“handwriting, style”)), from Old French estile, or from Medieval Latin stylus, both from Latin stilus (“pointed instrument; writing tool; composition; characteristic mode of expression; stem of a plant”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)teyg- (“to be sharp; to pierce, prick, puncture, stab; to goad”). a doublet of stylus. The verb is derived from the noun. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA