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.
Surgical jargon, unlike corporate jargon, is unadorned, direct and, for the evolving surgeon, quite effective.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 6, 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
There are just headlines and short summaries, presented as simply and unadorned as the plain-spoken Kavanagh himself.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 5, 2026
In “Enchanted Escape,” we see her ostentatiously unadorned Sèvres porcelain plates and silverware for the royal toilette, a pink neoclassical armchair for resting after doing very little.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 8, 2026
Fortified towns emerged in the third millennium B.C., with cemeteries whose great variation between unadorned and luxuriously furnished graves bespeaks emerging class differences.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
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.
