gaudy

gaudy, tawdry, garish, flashy, meretricious are comparable when meaning vulgar or cheap in its showiness.

Something is gaudy which uses gay colors and conspicuous ornaments or ornamentation lavishly, ostentatiously, and tastelessly

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gaudy floral prints

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false eloquence, like the prismatic glass, its gaudy colors spreads on ev'ry place— Pope

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another attendant, gaudy with jingling chains and brass buttons, led us along a corridor— Kenneth Roberts

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Something is tawdry which is not only gaudy but cheap and sleazy

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beneath the lamp her tawdry ribbons glare— Gay

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a fancy . . . fruitful, yet not wanton, and gay without being tawdry— Cowper

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he saw nothing else; the tawdry scenery, the soiled cotton velvet and flimsy crumpled satin, the reek of vulgarity, never touched his innocent mind— Deland

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Something is garish which is distressingly or offensively bright

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hide me from day's garish eye—Milton

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for this week he would produce a bunch [of flowers] as garish as a gypsy, all blue and purple and orange, but next week a bunch discreet as a pastel, all rose and gray with a dash of yellow— Sackville— West

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Something is flashy which dazzles for a moment but then reveals itself as shallow or vulgar display

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Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him, Paley an old woman, Edmund Burke a flashy sophist— Hazlitt

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the flashy rich boy in public school, buying toadyism— La Farge

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"what the public wants" is being translated into the flashy, the gadgety, the spectacular— Loewy}}

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Something is meretricious which allures by false or deceitful show (as of worth, value, or brilliancy)

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the jewels in the crisped hair, the diadem on the polished brow, are thought meretricious, theatrical, vulgar— Hazlitt

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the false taste, the showy and meretricious element . . . invading the social life of the period and supplanting the severe elegance, the instinctive grace of the eighteenth century— Binyon

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if a writer's attitude toward his characters and his scene is as vulgar as a showman's, as mercenary as an auctioneer's, vulgar and meretricious will his product for ever remain— Cather

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Analogous words: *showy, pretentious, ostentatious: vulgar, *coarse, gross: resplendent, gorgeous (see SPLENDID)

Antonyms: quiet (in taste or style)

Contrasted words: modest, *chaste, decent, pure