Word of the Day:
genteel
What It Means
Affectedly proper or refined; somewhat prudish refinement; excessively polite.
Polite and well-mannered.
Genteel in Context
“Genteel America was handicapped by meagerness of soul, thinness of temper, paucity of talent.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from French gentil (“gentile”), from Latin gentīlis (“of or belonging to the same people or nation”), from gēns (“clan; tribe; people, family”) + adjective suffix -īlis (“-ile”). Doublet of gentle, gentile, and jaunty. See also gens, gender, genus, and generation.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: genteel (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “genteel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/genteel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
