MERETRICIOUS

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does meretricious mean? 

• MERETRICIOUS (adjective)
  The adjective MERETRICIOUS has 3 senses:

1. like or relating to a prostitute

2. tastelessly showy

3. based on pretense; deceptively pleasing

  Familiarity information: MERETRICIOUS used as an adjective is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• MERETRICIOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Like or relating to a prostitute

Classified under:

Relational adjectives (pertainyms)

Context example:

meretricious relationships

Domain usage:

archaicism; archaism (the use of an archaic expression)

Pertainym:

prostitute (a woman who engages in sexual intercourse for money)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Tastelessly showy

Synonyms:

brassy; cheap; flash; flashy; garish; gaudy; gimcrack; loud; meretricious; tacky; tatty; tawdry; trashy

Context example:

tawdry ornaments

Similar:

tasteless (lacking aesthetic or social taste)

Derivation:

meretriciousness (tasteless showiness)

Sense 3

Meaning:

Based on pretense; deceptively pleasing

Synonyms:

gilded; glossy; meretricious; specious

Context example:

a meretricious argument

Similar:

insincere (lacking sincerity)

Derivation:

meretriciousness (an appearance of truth that is false or deceptive; seeming plausibility)

 Context examples 

The books on her father's shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the piano—all was just so much meretricious display.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one’s audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect.

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

The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader.

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

I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it—to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace—and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)