- 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{
gaudy floral prints
}{false eloquence, like the prismatic glass, its gaudy colors spreads on ev'ry place— Pope
}{another attendant, gaudy with jingling chains and brass buttons, led us along a corridor— Kenneth Roberts
}Something is tawdry which is not only gaudy but cheap and sleazy{beneath the lamp her tawdry ribbons glare— Gay
}{a fancy . . . fruitful, yet not wanton, and gay without being tawdry— Cowper
}{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
}Something is garish which is distressingly or offensively bright{hide me from day's garish eye—Milton
}{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
}Something is flashy which dazzles for a moment but then reveals itself as shallow or vulgar display{Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him, Paley an old woman, Edmund Burke a flashy sophist— Hazlitt
}{the flashy rich boy in public school, buying toadyism— La Farge
}{"what the public wants" is being translated into the flashy, the gadgety, the spectacular— Loewy}}
}Something is meretricious which allures by false or deceitful show (as of worth, value, or brilliancy){the jewels in the crisped hair, the diadem on the polished brow, are thought meretricious, theatrical, vulgar— Hazlitt
}{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
}{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
}Analogous words: *showy, pretentious, ostentatious: vulgar, *coarse, gross: resplendent, gorgeous (see SPLENDID)Antonyms: quiet (in taste or style)Contrasted words: modest, *chaste, decent, pure
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.