Word.ws English Dictionary

twee

/twiː/

twee adjective: overly quaint, dainty, cute or nice. Also the ellipsis of twee pop.

Adjective

twee (comparative more twee or tweer, superlative most twee or tweest)

  1. (Ireland, UK, derogatory) Overly quaint, dainty, cute or nice.
    • Those Beatrix Potter animals are a little twee for my taste.
    • Despite the fact that the designs were all a bit twee […] they stood out a mile in the market place at that time.1999, Janet Foster, Docklands: Urban Change and Conflict in a Community in Transition, London; Philadelphia, Pa.: UCL Press, →ISBN, page 82

Also used as

twee is also the ellipsis of twee pop.

Examples of twee in a sentence

  • As always with Disney, there are moments when it all seems a bit twee, others when it is excessively PC.2002, Peter Ellison, Essential Non-fiction, Dublin: Folens Publishers, →ISBN, page 40:
  • I just wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying, "I am a duckbilled platypus, and this is how I find my shrimps." I think it would have been twee.2005 September 8, Stephen S. Hall, quoting Richard Dawkins, “Darwin's Rottweiler: Sir Richard Dawkins: Evolution's fiercest champion, far...
  • [Neil] Tennant's accent obviously has a lot to do with that, but the fact he's rapping is further masked by his twee, effeminate delivery.2015 June 2, Kenneth Partridge, “With ‘West End Girls,’ Pet Shop Boys set a high standard for U.K. hip-hop”, in The A.V. Club, archived...
  • “Everything perfect, everything twee, everything pretty,” she said.2025 November 3, Julia Moskin, quoting Alison Roman, “Martha Stewart Transformed the Dinner Party. Was That a Good Thing?”, in The New York...

Synonyms of twee

Forms of twee

comparativemore twee
comparativetweer
superlativemost twee
superlativetweest

Origin of twee

From a childish pronunciation of sweet. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use in 1905 in Punch.

Words formed from twee

Words that rhyme with twee

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about twee

What does twee mean?
Twee means overly quaint, dainty, cute or nice.
How do you use twee in a sentence?
As always with Disney, there are moments when it all seems a bit twee, others when it is excessively PC.
What part of speech is twee?
Twee is an adjective.
How do you pronounce twee?
Twee is pronounced /twiː/ (UK).

Words near twee in the dictionary

  1. Tweddill
  2. tweddillite
  3. Tweddle
  4. Twedt
  5. Twedts
  6. twee
  7. twee pop
  8. tweeb
  9. tweebs
  10. tweece
  11. tweed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: twee (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-twee.wav.

Cite this entry: “twee.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/twee. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.