- ornate
- ornate, rococo, baroque, flamboyant, florid can all mean elaborately and often pretentiously decorated or designed.Ornate is applicable to anything heavily adorned or ornamented or conspicuously embellished{
an ornate style of architecture
}{the room's communicating door, heavily ornate with late Renaissance panels and tarnished silver handles— Maclnnes
}{in the fiacre were Gerald and a woman. Gerald . . . was talking eagerly to his ornate companion— Bennett
}{introduced the direct and colloquial manner upon the American public platform, as distinguished from the highly elaborated and often ornate style which had been established— Higginson)}
}Rococo basically applies to a French architectural style originating in the eighteenth century and characterized chiefly by the extravagant and often fantastic use of curves, shellwork, and fanciful excrescence. The term therefore implies the ornateness of design characteristic of this decorative style especially as evident in architectural details, in furniture, and in mirror and picture frames.It is often extended to describe a style (as in painting or writing) that seems tastelessly or meaninglessly ornate or overadorned{decided instead to have the wedding, rococo excess and all— Wouk
}{doesn't mind getting caught out with a rococo phrase or an overstuffed image— Los Angeles Times
}Baroque, which is sometimes interchanged with rococo, basically applies to a style of art and architecture which prevailed from the latter part of the sixteenth century to nearly the end of the eighteenth century and which emphasized energy in conception, amplitude in design, the use of dynamic contrasts, extremely high relief, and the employment of curved and often contorted forms{I entered this baroque interior, with its twisted columns and volutes and high-piled, hideous tombs, adorned with skeletons and allegorical figures and angels blowing trumpets— L. P. Smith
}In its extended sense baroque may suggest more grotesqueness and extravagance and less fancifulness than rococo, although it too may imply tasteless ornamentation{ba-roque poetry with its frigid vehemence, its exhibitionistic forcefulness and false dynamism, its arbitrary twisting and distortions— H. L. Davis
}{their literature, their modern painting and architecture, their music—it's all baroque. It gesticulates rhetorically, it struts across stages, it sobs and bawls in its efforts to show you how passionate it is— Huxley
}Flamboyant basically applies to a late French Gothic architectural style characterized by curves that suggest ascending flames (as in the tracery of windows). In its more general application flamboyant can suggest ornateness but more often stresses such elements as excess of color, conspicuous vigor and dash, or bold and daring display that suggest the freedom and brilliancy of flames{a flamboyant display of courage
}{flamboyant penmanship— Dowden
}{the flamboyant period of prose— Saints bury
}{these . . . flamboyant tricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of fashion— Quiller— Couch
}{some [people] are simply present at accidents, without being involved at all—catalysts of death, if you'll pardon a flamboyant phrase— Theodore Sturgeon
}Florid implies richness, usually overrichness, in details, shown particularly in the use of color, figures of speech, or flourishes, for their own sake; it implies, therefore, showy and ostentatious embellishment{a florid style of poetry
}{a florid musical composition
}{the screen was an old one, of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a rather florid Louis-Quatorze pattern— Wilde
}{inexplicable how a book . . . can ... be banned because of the manner in which it is advertised and sold. However florid its cover, whatever the pitch of its advertisements, the contents remain the same— W. O. Douglas
}Analogous words: adorned, decorated, ornamented, embellished (see ADORN): flowery, aureate (see RHETORICAL): luxurious, sumptuous, opulent: *showy, ostentatiousAntonyms: chaste: austere
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
