outré
/uˈtɹeɪ/
outré adjective: beyond what is customary or proper; extravagant.
Adjective
outré (comparative more outré, superlative most outré)
- Beyond what is customary or proper; extravagant.
- I believe I have been very rude; but really Miss Fairfax has done her hair in so odd a way—so very odd a way—that I cannot keep my eyes from her. I never saw any thing so outrée!—Those curls!—This must be a fancy of her own. I see nobody else looking like her!1815 December (indicated as 1816), [Jane Austen], chapter VIII, in Emma: […], volume II, London: […] [Charles Roworth and James Moyes] for John Murray, →OCLC, page 152
- He hated people who did not know where to stop. Ernest was always so outré and strange; there was never any knowing what he would do next, except that it would be something unusual and silly.1903, Samuel Butler, chapter 50, in The Way of All Flesh
- Very unconventional.
- To begin with, King Lear is the most unconventional, the most nearly hysterical, the most outré and outrageous play Shakespeare ever wrote.1992, David Littlejohn, The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera, Chapter 16: The Twentieth Century Takes on Shakespeare, page 261
- Synonyms:
- bizarre, eccentric, outlandish
Examples of outré in a sentence
- Her career as a performer, a model and a high priestess of the outré has been rooted for decades in catwalk-Kabuki mischief and provocation.2015 October 22, Jeff Gordinier, “‘I’ll Never Write My Memoirs,’ Grace Jones’s Memoirs”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- Are his patrons simply too giddy in this post-pandemic moment to muster sustained outrage over his outré behavior?2021 July 17, Jacob Bernstein, “Keith McNally Stirs the Pot”, in The New York Times:
Synonyms of outré
Forms of outré
| comparative | more outré |
|---|---|
| superlative | most outré |
| alternative form | outre |
| alternative form | outrée |
Origin of outré
French outré, form of outrer (“to go to excess”); see also outre (“beyond”).
Words formed from outré
Words that rhyme with outré
Questions about outré
- What does outré mean?
- Outré means beyond what is customary or proper; extravagant.
- How do you use outré in a sentence?
- Her career as a performer, a model and a high priestess of the outré has been rooted for decades in catwalk-Kabuki mischief and provocation.
- What part of speech is outré?
- Outré is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce outré?
- Outré is pronounced /uˈtɹeɪ/.
Words near outré in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: outré (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-outré.wav.
Cite this entry: “outré.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/outr%C3%A9. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.