PICTURESQUE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does picturesque mean? 

• PICTURESQUE (adjective)
  The adjective PICTURESQUE has 2 senses:

1. suggesting or suitable for a picture; pretty as a picture

2. strikingly expressive

  Familiarity information: PICTURESQUE used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PICTURESQUE (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Suggesting or suitable for a picture; pretty as a picture

Context example:

a picturesque village

Similar:

beautiful (delighting the senses or exciting intellectual or emotional admiration)

Derivation:

picturesqueness (visually vivid and pleasing)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Strikingly expressive

Context example:

a picturesque description of the rainforest

Similar:

colorful; colourful (striking in variety and interest)

Derivation:

picturesqueness (the quality of being strikingly expressive or vivid)

 Context examples 

They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

It was a lovely drive, along winding roads rich in the picturesque scenes that delight beauty-loving eyes.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

In your picturesque account of the matter, which I read with great interest some months later, you assert that the wall was sheer.

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

The course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

But now she should not know what was picturesque when she saw it.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

I like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

For the first time in my life I experienced the desire to murder—“saw red,” as some of our picturesque writers phrase it.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

It was a bird's-eye view of creation, as interpreted by science, which, in language always clear and sometimes picturesque, he unfolded before us.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It was three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable: a gentleman's manor-house, not a nobleman's seat: battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)