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tawdry

UK/ˈtɔːdɹi/US/ˈtɔ.dɹi/
adjectiveC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,115 of 15,258leans spoken

Tawdry means cheap and showy, and rather sordid. A tawdry affair, tawdry decorations, tawdry and sad.

It adds moral shabbiness to cheapness, which is what separates it from merely gaudy. The word is a worn-down Saint Audrey: lace necklaces sold at her fair in Ely were called Saint Audrey lace, and the name collapsed into tawdry as the quality fell.

Definitions of tawdry

  1. 1adjectivetawdryCheap and showy, and rather sordid.C2

    “The seaside town was full of tawdry souvenir shops and flashing lights.”

tawdry is a quality.

Remember it

Cheap lace was sold to pilgrims at Saint Audrey's fair, and Saint Audrey lace wore down in the mouth to tawdry. It has meant cheap and bright and worth little ever since.

hooks ontolacecheap

Where it comes from

A worn-down form of Saint Audrey lace, sold at the saint's fair in Ely and known for being cheap.

Shortened from tawdry lace; originally a corruption and rebracketing of Saint Audrey lace (from Old English Æþelþrȳþ). The lace necklaces sold to pilgrims to Saint Audrey fell out of fashion in the 17th century, and so tawdry was reinterpreted as meaning “cheap” or “vulgar”.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

tawdry in the wild

  • Later dishonest jewellers passed pinchbeck off as gold; over the years the name came to connotate a cheap and tawdry imitation of gold.

    Pinchbeck (alloy)

  • Misaki considers her shamanic civil service position even more tawdry and less respectable than her sex work.

    Ghost Talker's Daydream

  • Frequent visits are paid to "Helen's Place," a tawdry house modeled on that of legendary Dublin madam Becky Cooper (much like Becky Cooper, Helen has a talking parrot).

    Mercier and Camier

  • Later critics such as Hazlitt and Fuseli still found them problematic, Hazlitt describing them as "painted, tawdry".

    Hampton Court Beauties

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.