felicitous

Adjective

felicitous (comparative more felicitous, superlative most felicitous)

1. Appropriate, apt, fitting.
   • Walter again pursued his way, lost in a very mixed reverie; sometimes writhing under an idea of degradation, in thus making a trade of his talents; and then, again, somewhat consoled by the pride of art; for how many felicitous and stinging epigrams arose in his mind!1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “Alteration”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, pages 19–20
   • As a post-prandial speaker, however, Thackeray was undeniably the reverse of felicitous.1894, George Augustus Sala, “The Real Thackeray”, in Things I Have Seen and People I Have Known […], volume I, London; Paris: Cassell and Company […], →OCLC, page 32

   Synonyms:

   opportune, wealful

   Antonyms:

   infelicitous, unfelicitous

2. Auspicious, fortunate, lucky.
   • There are a variety of charms, of various kinds, for which there are no names and no particular uses; but they are considered felicitous, and are therefore worn by the poorer classes, who cannot buy the more valuable charms.1831 July 2, John Robert Morrison, “XIV.—Some Account of Charms, Talismans, and Felicitous Appendages Worn about the Person, or Hung up in Houses, &c., Used by the Chinese”, in Transactions of the...

   Antonyms:

   infelicitous, unfelicitous

3. Causing happiness or pleasure.
   • The same chronicler [John Capgrave] makes Henry of Agincourt die a day earlier than he really did, apparently only for the purpose of manufacturing a sort of coincidence. 'His end fell well on the feast of Saint Felix, for he was felicitous in all things—felicitous in endowing the church...1870 December 31, “Coincidences”, in William, Robert Chambers, editors, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Art, volume VII, number 366 (Fourth Series), London; Edinburgh: Printed...
   • He is looking the very picture of health, and on the whole his dreams are felicitous. For instance, last night he dreamt that he had been buying strawberries as large as gourds. It proves the magnificent vitality of his dreams.1920 July 8, Rabindranath Tagore, edited by [C[harles] F[reer] A[ndrews]], Letters from Abroad, Triplicane, Madras, Tamil Nadu: S. Ganesan, publisher, published 1924, →OCLC, page 5

   Antonyms:

   infelicitous, unfelicitous

4. Of a sentence or utterance: semantically and pragmatically coherent; fitting in the context.
   • This sentence is grammatical; it is just not felicitous.
   • The aim of this paper is to compare rst [rhetorical structure theory], sdrt [segmented discourse representation theory] and discourse dependency dags [directed acyclic graphs] with respect to the following question: do these formalisms allow the representation of all the discourse structures which...2008, Laurence Danlos, “Strong Generative Capacity of rst, sdrt and discourse dependency dags”, in Anton Benz, Peter Kühnlein, editors, Constraints in Discourse (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series; 172)...

   Antonyms:

   infelicitous