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Addisonian

American  
[ad-uh-soh-nee-uhn] / ˌæd əˈsoʊ ni ən /

adjective

  1. of, relating to, or characteristic of Joseph Addison or his works.

  2. fluent and clear in literary style.

  3. of or relating to Addison's disease.


noun

  1. one who studies the works of Joseph Addison.

Etymology

Origin of Addisonian

Addison + -ian

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

There are the Addisonian "Silence Dogood" letters with their gently satiric barbs at Harvard College, bits of local gossip, humorous anecdotes, and a masterful and intricate essay on the value of a paper currency.

From Time Magazine Archive

Other pugilists, contributing to other papers, groaned under the supervision of a member of the staff who cut out their best passages and altered the rest into Addisonian English.

From Psmith, Journalist by Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)

In these letters, his earliest work of any significance, he touches the Addisonian string upon which his critics have harped so insistently ever since.

From Washington Irving by Boynton, Henry Walcott

"Literary expression," that Addisonian English stuff, whose elegance pleasantly conceals the lack of ideas beneath, is taboo in these parts.

From Walking-Stick Papers by Holliday, Robert Cortes

He, therefore, one evening prepared an article, before he was sixteen years of age, which, with the greatest care, was written in pure Addisonian diction.

From Benjamin Franklin A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago American Pioneers and Patriots Series by Abbott, John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot)

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