unadorned
Britishadjective
Explanation
Something unadorned has no decorations or frills. It's plain, like a room with nothing on the walls or a person wearing purely functional clothes and no accessories. To adorn something is to decorate it or to dress it up. If something is unadorned, it lacks decorations. An unadorned Christmas tree is just a plain old pine tree. If a woman’s face is unadorned, she’s not wearing makeup. The unadorned truth is the plain truth, with no nonsense. This word means about the same as undecorated, and it can often mean dull. But that’s a matter of taste.
Vocabulary lists containing unadorned
The Devil's Arithmetic
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The Joy Luck Club
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Gathering Blue
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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.
There’s nothing more riveting on stage than the truth, and here we have human beings in all their flagrant, unadorned and seemingly irreconcilable complications.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 2, 2026
Private-label merchandise no longer means generic, unadorned products sitting on the shelf, but rather filling a hole in the assortment at a decent price point.
From Barron's ● Apr. 9, 2026
Unfortunately for the listener, the actress Kimberly Farr seeks to infuse Ms. Goodman’s careful, unadorned prose with too much energy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 12, 2026
Joseph navigated those years in the wake with unadorned reverence, while starting a family of his own and directing some of the most transcendent music videos of the 2010s.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 4, 2026
He spends entire weekends holed up in the house, reading books from Gerald and Lydia’s shelves, admiring the sunlight that filters through the enormous unadorned windows during the course of the day.
From "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.