TASTEFUL

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does tasteful mean? 

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

1. having or showing or conforming to good taste

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

 Dictionary entry details 

• TASTEFUL (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Having or showing or conforming to good taste

Similar:

aesthetic; artistic; esthetic (aesthetically pleasing)

understated; unostentatious; unpretentious (exhibiting restrained good taste)

Also:

elegant (refined and tasteful in appearance or behavior or style)

unpretentious (lacking pretension or affectation)

Attribute:

appreciation; discernment; perceptiveness; taste (delicate discrimination (especially of aesthetic values))

Antonym:

tasteless (lacking aesthetic or social taste)

Derivation:

tastefulness (elegance indicated by good taste)

 Context examples 

Miss Thorpe, however, being four years older than Miss Morland, and at least four years better informed, had a very decided advantage in discussing such points; she could compare the balls of Bath with those of Tunbridge, its fashions with the fashions of London; could rectify the opinions of her new friend in many articles of tasteful attire; could discover a flirtation between any gentleman and lady who only smiled on each other; and point out a quiz through the thickness of a crowd.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

I was so filled with the play, and with the past—for it was, in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along—that I don't know when the figure of a handsome well-formed young man dressed with a tasteful easy negligence which I have reason to remember very well, became a real presence to me.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

He had time to note the light, fluffy something that hid her queenly head, the tasteful lines of her wrapped figure, the gracefulness of her carriage and of the hand that caught up her skirts; and then she was gone and he was left staring at the two girls of the cannery, at their tawdry attempts at prettiness of dress, their tragic efforts to be clean and trim, the cheap cloth, the cheap ribbons, and the cheap rings on the fingers.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)