high-toned

Or high-tone

[hahy-tohnd]

adjective

1. having high principles; dignified.

2. having or aspiring to good taste, high standards, or refinement.

   He writes for a high-toned literary review.

3. affectedly stylish or genteel.

high-toned

adjective

1. having a superior social, moral, or intellectual quality

2. affectedly superior

3. high in tone

Word History and Origins

Origin of high-toned¹

First recorded in 1770–80

Example Sentences

“The Gilded Age” has always plied high-toned melodrama as its chief asset, but Season 3 ripens the starched formality of previous episodes into succulence.

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Reviewer David Kipen celebrated Wallace’s “stupendously high-toned vocabulary and gleeful low-comedy diction, coupled with a sense of syntax so elongated that he can seem to go for days without surfacing.”

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Murders, sundry lesser crimes and a tense climax aside, “Renegade Nell” is light-hearted, cheeky and something short of high-toned in that peculiar British way.

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Wielding a double-barreled shotgun in his review for The New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden dismissed Sparks’s book as “treacly” and called the film “a high-toned cinematic greeting card.”

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Today, the city of two million is an international gateway for travelers headed to famous ski destinations like Niseko, a high-toned village catering mostly to foreigners.

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