beautiful

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The not-beautiful is as real as the beautiful, the not-just as the just.

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Definitions (9)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. adjective Having qualities that delight the senses, especially the sense of sight.
  2. adjective Excellent; wonderful.
  3. Syntax Note
    Synonyms: beautiful, lovely, pretty, handsome, comely, fair1
    All these adjectives apply to what excites aesthetic admiration. Beautiful is most comprehensive: a beautiful child; a beautiful painting; a beautiful mathematical proof.
    Lovely applies to what inspires emotion rather than intellectual appreciation: "They were lovely, your eyes” (George Seferis).
    What is pretty is beautiful in a delicate or graceful way: a pretty face; a pretty song; a pretty room.
    Handsome stresses poise and dignity of form and proportion: a very large, handsome paneled library. "She is very pretty, but not so extraordinarily handsome” (William Makepeace Thackeray).
    Comely suggests wholesome physical attractiveness: "Mrs. Hurd is a large woman with a big, comely, simple face” (Ernest Hemingway).
    Fair emphasizes freshness or purity: "In the highlands, in the country places,/Where the old plain men have rosy faces,/And the young fair maidens/Quiet eyes” (Robert Louis Stevenson).

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (3)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (50)

  • If this power of producing the beautiful has been always so fascinating that the human race for its sake have bowed down at the feet even of men deficient in moral worth, if we cannot forbear loving the painter, poet, and sculptor, how much more shall we love God, who, with all goodness, has also all beauty! —  Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2
  • Well, now, that's what I call a beautiful way to begin Glastonbury —  Drowned In Sound // Feed
  • Ukranian model Eugenia Tyshchenko, 18, enjoyed visiting Lebanon to take part in the runway and felt that bearing the cold was well worth it to put on what she called a beautiful show, with the contrast between the swimwear and the snow. —  The Daily Star > News Feed
  • And she was beautiful--beautiful, with a grace, a stateliness and dignity beyond compare Mr. Sefton glanced down the column and saw there a head upon which the brown hair curled slightly. —  Before the Dawn A Story of the Fall of Richmond
  • We cannot of course separate sharply the aesthetic motive from everything else in studying so highly complex an object as war, but that war does partake of the nature of what we call the beautiful_, and that the craving for the beautiful is a factor in the causes of war seem to be certain. —  The Psychology of Nations A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
 

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Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

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Used in the same context Used in the Same Context

lovely ·  bright ·  handsome
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. Early modern English also beutiful, bewtiful, butyful, etc.; from beauty + -ful.
 

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/ˈbjutɪfəl/
by American Heritage

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