Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Something false; a sham.
- noun A small hairpiece; a toupee.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Superadded; done after the work is finished: noting a superadded ornament of sculpture or architecture, especially when inappropriate or in false taste. Also
postique .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Any item of
false hair worn on the head or face, such as a false beard or wig.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun something that is a counterfeit; not what it seems to be
- noun a covering or bunch of human or artificial hair used for disguise or adornment
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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A metal false beard, or postiche, which was a sign of sovereignty, was worn by queens as well as kings ... a fashion existing from about 3000 to 1580 BC.
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Also: une mèche folle = a stray lock/wisp of hair une mèche rebelle = a wayward lock of hair une mèche lente = a safety fuse une mèche postiche = a hairpiece, toupee
Enfants 2004
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I encountered a number of words new to me in an enigmatic post chez l'Eudæmoniste (chez whom there is nil postiche) that is either a riff on the word post itself or a gloomy meditation (or of course both).
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You men wear your hats on your heads, and can easily get them straight; we don't, we wear them on our hair, or our scalpettes, or our transformations, or on any _postiche_ that may be fashionable or necessary, and can only tell whether they are straight, or even the right way round, by means of a looking-glass.
Our Stage and Its Critics By "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette" Edward Fordham Spence 1896
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Fastidiousness, at any rate, is very good _postiche_ for modesty: it is always decent, it can never be coarse.
Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Selected from the Works of Ouida 1839-1908 Ouida 1873
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A metal false beard, or postiche, which was a sign of sovereignty, was worn by queens as well as kings ... a fashion existing from about 3000 to 1580 BC.
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com Summer Qassim 2009
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I have a fragment of their plaster postiche copying the close-grained Egyptian granite; the oily lustre of the quartz is so fresh and the peculiar structure of the rock, with its mica scintillations, so admirably rendered as to deceive, after two thousand years, the eye of a trained mineralogist.]
Old Calabria Norman Douglas 1910
bilby commented on the word postiche
"We would look askance at anyone who could not bear to discard fallen hair, now that hair shirts are out of fashion, but sophisticated Western people often the wear the hair of others as a postiche or toupee."
- 'One man's mutilation is another man's beautification', Germaine Greer in The Madwoman's Underclothes.
September 1, 2008