Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The quality or condition of being sentimental, especially excessively or extravagantly so.
- noun A sentimental idea or an expression of it.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The quality of being sentimental; affectation of fine or tender feeling or exquisite sensibility; sentimentalism.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The quality or state of being sentimental.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun An act of being
sentimental .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun extravagant or affected feeling or emotion
- noun falsely emotional in a maudlin way
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him.
Swann's Way 2003
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There were ballads to make the heart beat fast, and one little tragedy, _The Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, which, though not over-disposed to what he called sentimentality, I could not read without tears.
Stories of Authors, British and American Edwin Watts Chubb 1912
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It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him.
Swann's Way Marcel Proust 1896
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This my swashbuckler misnames sentimentality -- and thus I feel that he always tends to admire the wrong qualities, because he condones even what he calls sentimentality in one whom he chooses to admire.
The Silent Isle Arthur Christopher Benson 1893
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Carl Jung said that sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
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The great Irish writer James Joyce said that sentimentality is unearned emotion.
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I like it when old farts like Kristof remind people that wallowing in sentimentality with Little Lord Fauntleroy is just as fun today as it was back when it was written.
Speaking as one old fart to another Roger Sutton 2009
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In the postwar years, that combination of pathos, a certain sentimentality and a spirit of resilience endeared him to the British public and probably went a long way to explaining his popularity in Albania.
Thanks to plucky Norman Wisdom, it's now OK to fail Stephanie Merritt 2010
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Carl Jung said that sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
Archive 2009-08-01 2009
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The great Irish writer James Joyce said that sentimentality is unearned emotion.
Archive 2009-08-01 2009
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