Word.ws English Dictionary

penny-dreadfulish

penny-dreadfulish adjective: resembling or characteristic of a penny dreadful.

Adjective

penny-dreadfulish (comparative more penny-dreadfulish, superlative most penny-dreadfulish)

  1. Resembling or characteristic of a penny dreadful.
    • She has been quite penny-dreadfulish-sword-and-mask mysterious lately; she goes about with her lips pursed up and a sparkle in her eye.1913, Doris Egerton Jones, Pied Piper, George W. Jacobs & Company, page 254
    • But if Sedlar and Ales aren't the same, then there's only one conclusion to come to: they bear an uncanny resemblance to each other! We've been evading that conclusion because it seems—er—pulpy and penny-dreadfulish; but you can't get around it.1936, Barnaby Ross, Drury Lane's Last Case, republished, March 1946, as by Ellery Queen, Little, Brown, page 250

Forms of penny-dreadfulish

comparativemore penny-dreadfulish
superlativemost penny-dreadfulish

Origin of penny-dreadfulish

From penny dreadful + -ish.

Questions about penny-dreadfulish

What does penny-dreadfulish mean?
Penny-dreadfulish means resembling or characteristic of a penny dreadful.
What part of speech is penny-dreadfulish?
Penny-dreadfulish is an adjective.

Words near penny-dreadfulish in the dictionary

  1. penny wise, pound foolish
  2. penny-a-line
  3. penny-a-liner
  4. penny-a-liners
  5. penny-ante
  6. penny-dreadfulish
  7. penny-dreadfulism
  8. penny-farthing
  9. penny-farthings
  10. penny-father
  11. penny-fathers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: penny-dreadfulish (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.

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