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.
“Girls Like Girls” may be conventionally imagined, but there’s an admirable focus on unadorned warmth in Kiyoko’s storytelling: She likes her girls and cares enough to want us to like them, too.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 19, 2026
His tough, unadorned style is so effortlessly colloquial, thought fellow crime writer Raymond Chandler, that it “does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026
That score, in the 30th minute of the final game of World Cup qualifying in the fall of 1989, was as unlikely and unadorned as it proved to be earth-shattering.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 7, 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
This was plain and unadorned for the most part, but all well and fairly made: round platters, bowls and dishes of glazed brown clay or turned box-wood, smooth and clean.
From "The Two Towers" by J. R. R. Tolkien
Definitions 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.
