TRITE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does trite mean? 

• TRITE (adjective)
  The adjective TRITE has 1 sense:

1. repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse

  Familiarity information: TRITE used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• TRITE (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse

Synonyms:

banal; commonplace; hackneyed; old-hat; shopworn; stock; threadbare; timeworn; tired; trite; well-worn

Context example:

the trite metaphor 'hard as nails'

Similar:

unoriginal (not original; not being or productive of something fresh and unusual)

Derivation:

triteness (unoriginality as a result of being dull and hackneyed)

 Context examples 

For the rest, whether trite or novel, it is short.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I found her more interesting than her little problem, which, by the way, is rather a trite one.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Don't cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh; save your constancy and ardour for an adequate cause; forbear to waste them on trite transient objects.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Kindly, as usual—and, as usual, rather trite—she condoled with him on the pressure of business he had had all day; on the annoyance it must have been to him with that painful sprain: then she commended his patience and perseverance in going through with it.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Then take my word for it,—I am not a villain: you are not to suppose that—not to attribute to me any such bad eminence; but, owing, I verily believe, rather to circumstances than to my natural bent, I am a trite commonplace sinner, hackneyed in all the poor petty dissipations with which the rich and worthless try to put on life.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger—when I found that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile—when I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders—even then I restrained myself: I eschewed upbraiding, I curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)