Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state or quality of being garish; gaudiness; finery; affected or ostentatious show; flightiness of temper; want of steadiness.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun tasteless showiness.
  • noun strident color or excessive ornamentation.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The quality of being garish.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun strident color or excessive ornamentation
  • noun tasteless showiness

Etymologies

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Examples

  • There was an almost blinding clarity to it all, both in terms of complexity of counterpoint, and that slight garishness of texture that we think of as quintessentially Brucknerian.

    Lucerne Festival Orchestra – review 2011

  • I wanted to make a movie about working class people and working poor people and I didn't want to embrace the stereotypes in a way of the '70s and the garishness.

    Brad Balfour: Chronicling Black Panthers, Award-Winning Director Knows Where Night Catches Us Brad Balfour 2011

  • However, amateur road bicycle enthusiasts forget that professionals look this way because they have to, not because they want to, and among the non-recessed cleat set garishness has become the norm.

    Spoils of Victory: Jousting with Legitimacy BikeSnobNYC 2010

  • But for all its garishness I don't completely hate it.

    Una LaMarche: Project Runway Episode 7 Recap: Last Resort 2010

  • He hailed a cab, and took it back to Cameron's townhouse-which would not be Cameron's for very much longer'leaving the noise and garishness of the Barbary Coast behind him.

    red dust Ryn Cricket 2010

  • But for all its garishness I don't completely hate it.

    Una LaMarche: Project Runway Episode 7 Recap: Last Resort 2010

  • I eschew garishness in bike clothes--including refusing to buy the local bike club design--preferring preppy solids in all cases.

    Spoils of Victory: Jousting with Legitimacy BikeSnobNYC 2010

  • He has wandered, with an eye to the box office, up bypaths into ladies boudoirs and baths, he has been accused of garishness, bad taste and a hundred and one other faults.

    Empire of Dreams Scott Eyman 2010

  • An updating of the 1927 Traumnovelle (Dream Novel) by Arthur Schnitzler, an Austrian writer whose deeply psychological work resembled Freud's, the picture remains an unsettling blend of antiquated garishness and modern transgression -- an alternate sexual universe haunted by ghouls of the past, present and future.

    Kim Morgan: Ten Years of Traummovie: Eyes Wide Shut 2009

  • (This may be no accident, since there is something almost Richard Meier­esque about Facebook: The garishness of most YouTube videos might despoil the high-modernist aesthetic of the Facebook user interface.)

    About Facebook 2007

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