English Dictionary |
SHABBY-GENTEEL
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Dictionary entry overview: What does shabby-genteel mean?
• SHABBY-GENTEEL (adjective)
The adjective SHABBY-GENTEEL has 1 sense:
1. trying to maintain dignity and self respect despite shabbiness
Familiarity information: SHABBY-GENTEEL used as an adjective is very rare.
Dictionary entry details
Sense 1
Meaning:
Trying to maintain dignity and self respect despite shabbiness
Similar:
proud (feeling self-respect or pleasure in something by which you measure your self-worth; or being a reason for pride)
Context examples
The public, represented by a boy with a comforter, and a shabby-genteel man secretly eating crumbs out of his coat pockets, was warming itself at a stove in the centre of the Court.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines of dingy two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in enclosure, where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded laurel bushes made a hard fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
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