tawdry
Americanadjective
-
(of finery, trappings, etc.) gaudy; showy and cheap.
- Synonyms:
- meretricious, flashy
- Antonyms:
- elegant
-
low or mean; base.
tawdry motives.
noun
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of tawdry
1605–15; short for ( Sain ) t Audrey lace, i.e., neck lace bought at St. Audrey's Fair in Ely, England; so called after St. Audrey ( Old English Aethelthrȳth, died 679), Northumbrian queen and patron saint of Ely, who, according to tradition, died of a throat tumor which she considered just punishment of her youthful liking for neck laces
Explanation
Tawdry means cheap, shoddy, or tasteless. It can be used to describe almost anything from clothes to people to even events or affairs. You know that shiny black slip you picked up for nothing at a garage sale and used as the skirt of your lion-tamer Halloween costume? It's a bit tawdry. But it would really be tawdry if you wore it on a regular day out. Tawdry things often have a hint of desperation and immorality — like tawdry extramarital affairs or tawdry tales. With tawdry decorations and jewelry, quality has been exchanged for lots of flash and shine.
Vocabulary lists containing tawdry
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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.
See Examples For:
Kris pops in a disc of “Camp Miasma’s” tawdry 2008 reboot, which cinematographer Eric Yue makes look as flat as the discounted DVD.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026
Yet “Venetian Vespers,” for all its moodiness, is elegantly compressed—the central drama occupies only a few days—and the conspiracy at its core is convincingly tawdry.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025
Against this enclave’s polished stone walls and bannisters, Lee looks every ragged inch of the tawdry menace the politicians and businessmen he squares off against expect him to be.
From Salon ● Sep. 23, 2025
He called that meeting "the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy".
From BBC ● Aug. 18, 2025
We didn’t amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since.
From "Travels with Charley in Search of America" by John Steinbeck
I’d give that honor to “The Fifth Step,” which in just 10 pages should scare anyone who’s been paying attention to the true crime stories splashed across the screens of this country’s tawdrier news sources.
From Seattle Times ● May 27, 2024
It’s upscale, informative reality TV, even as it tracks with tawdrier shows.
From Slate ● Aug. 3, 2020
A movie about one of the sadder, tawdrier episodes in the saga could only feed this syndrome.
From New York Times ● Apr. 4, 2018
The sport has also found itself at the center of some of Washington's tawdrier influence scandals in recent years, including those Jack Abramoff junkets to Scotland.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 29, 2010
The scaffolding of much highly-prized sentiment would collapse, and the world of poetry and pageantry—particularly that of the tawdrier and more vendible poetry and pageantry—would be poorer by so much.
From An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation by Thorstein Veblen
It’s quite a life, but the script by Stefani Robinson only cherry-picks the tawdriest bits from his Wikipedia entry for this biopic.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 20, 2023
While every show had its own brand of scandalousness, “Jerry” became the juiciest, the tawdriest, the ultimate lowbrow modern-day freak show.
From New York Times ● Jan. 17, 2018
Though established news organizations may filter out the tawdriest ads, other sites will run them and profit from them.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 13, 2016
No organization wants to be a minor player in a major story, thus establishing a crude dynamic in which maximum resources are thrown at even the tawdriest detail.
From Time ● Jul. 26, 2010
As if to justify myself to myself, my mind conceived of them only in their meanest and tawdriest aspects.
From Ghetto Tragedies by Israel Zangwill
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.
