Word.ws English Dictionary

tawdriest

tawdriest is the superlative form of tawdry.

Meaning of tawdry

Adjective

tawdry (comparative tawdrier, superlative tawdriest)

  1. Of clothing, appearance, etc., cheap and gaudy; showy.
    • The rest of his dress—a dress always sufficiently tawdry—was overcharged with lace, embroidery, and ornament of every kind, and the plume of feathers which he wore was so high, as if intended to sweep the roof of the hall.1823, Sir Walter Scott, chapter 33, in Quentin Durward
  2. Of a character, behavior, or situation, etc., unseemly, base, mean-spirited, shameful.
    • [T]he "greaser" was a dirty, idle, shiftless, treacherous, tawdry vagabond, dwelling in a disgracefully primitive house, and backward in every aspect of civilization.1918, Stewart Edward White, chapter 1, in The Forty-Niners
    Synonyms:
    sordid

See all 4 meanings of tawdry

Questions about tawdriest

What is tawdriest the superlative form of?
Tawdriest is the superlative form of tawdry.

Words near tawdriest in the dictionary

  1. Tawason
  2. Tawau
  3. tawdered
  4. tawdrier
  5. tawdries
  6. tawdriest
  7. tawdrily
  8. tawdriness
  9. tawdrinesses
  10. tawdry
  11. tawdry lace

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tawdriest (page history and authors); tawdry (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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Cite this entry: “tawdriest.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tawdriest. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.