stagy
Americanadjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of stagy
Explanation
Something that's stagy is so overly dramatic that it might as well have happened on a stage. When you talk to your friend in a loud, stagy voice, you behave as if you have an audience. Something that's artificial and a bit theatrical is stagy, like the stagy decor in your bedroom or the stagy dialogue in a writer's first novel. You could also call these things hammy or exaggerated—they're just a little bit over the top. The adjective stagy comes from stage and its meaning of "a raised platform for a performance," from the Latin staticum, "place for standing."
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:
Employing a stagy New York accent, and saddled with a distractingly unfortunate blond wig, Ms. McCann delivers a long, discursive monologue both boastful and aggressively flirtatious.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 23, 2025
This framing device, which has the clunky air of a middlebrow play, provides a convenient if stagy way of breaking down his biography into manageable parts.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 9, 2024
With the exception of James Gray’s more cinematically composed “Armageddon Time,” the movies have offered simple, stagy showcases for Hopkins, a lion in winter.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 17, 2024
An ambitious period piece given an appropriately vintage look by the cinematographer Robert Patrick Stern, “Brooklyn 45” is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy.
From New York Times ● Jun. 8, 2023
Now he pauses outside the bathroom door, clears his throat, a stagy ahem.
From "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
Living on bread, butter and fruit, she became a stagier or unpaid apprentice at the bakery of Gerard Mulot, a master pâtissier, boulanger and chocolatier.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 8, 2026
The tableaux in some pictures are stagier than in others; a few push, uncomfortably, toward the grotesque.
From New York Times ● Jul. 29, 2021
The same techniques, however, can make Cameron’s stagier shots — those rooted in literature, art history and biblical narrative — a bit cloying.
From New York Times ● Aug. 22, 2013
But the music falters: in dramatizing his novel, Capote has told a stagier story, and brought in more themes than he can orchestrate or develop.
From Time Magazine Archive
But in a tale of modern life no trick could well be stagier.
From Adventures in Criticism by Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, Sir
He was the most unstagey actor on the stage, and the stagiest off I ever met.
From A Witch of the Hills, v. 2-2 by Warden, Florence
And they hire stage actors to interpret the stagiest of stage plots in as stagy a way as they know how.
From A Librarian's Open Shelf by Bostwick, Arthur E.
Hernani, the first performance of which marked the turning-point of the movement, is a piece of bombastic melodrama, full of the stagiest clap-trap and the most turgid declamation.
From Landmarks in French Literature by Strachey, Giles Lytton
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.
