chocolate-box

[ chaw-kuh-lit-boks, chok-uh-, chawk-lit-, chok- ]

adjective
  1. excessively decorative and sentimental, as the pictures or designs on some boxes of chocolate candy; prettified: decorous, chocolate-box paintings of Victorian garden parties.

Origin of chocolate-box

1
First recorded in 1890–95

Words Nearby chocolate-box

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use chocolate-box in a sentence

  • No, mark you, he'd take jolly good care that his sentimentality didn't make him see her as a chocolate-box picture!

    The Twilight of the Souls | Louis Couperus
  • After all these weeks you're going to throw me away like an old chocolate-box.

    The Vanity Girl | Compton Mackenzie
  • Like that, like that, at any rate, she no longer looked like the picture on a chocolate-box.

    The Twilight of the Souls | Louis Couperus
  • Not strictly beautiful, perhaps; but then I don't like the chocolate-box sort of woman.

  • Annabel had wriggled off the sofa and was pointing to a gay chocolate box on the mahogany wash-stand that served as a sideboard.

    Tommy Tregennis | Mary Elizabeth Phillips

British Dictionary definitions for chocolate-box

chocolate-box

noun
  1. (modifier) informal sentimentally pretty or appealing

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012