Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A cheap and showy object of little or no use; a gewgaw.
- adj. Cheap and tasteless; gaudy: "The shelves groan with an array of gimcrack gifts from fans: a stuffed piranha fish ... a ceramic ... bull, a papier-mâché replica of an Apollo moonwalker” ( Harry F. Waters).
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A spruce or pert boy.
- n. A showy, unsubstantial thing; a pretty or fanciful thing; a toy; a gewgaw.
- Showy but trivial; fanciful or trumpery.
- Also spelled jimcrack.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A trivial mechanism; a device.
- n. A toy; a pretty thing; an ornamental object of no great value.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. tastelessly showy
- n. ornamental objects of no great value
Etymologies
- Possibly alteration of Middle English gibecrake, small ornament.
Examples
“December 5th, 2007 at 4:33 am oh my…. he’s a very angry man isn’t he? hospitals like the gimcrack are the last places many people live before ending up in a funeral home. all our staff have very black senses of humour. it’s a prerequisite for the job.”
“If you find any, let us know and we'll document them through the day, with some kind of gimcrack rating.”
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“Every time a shingle is added to the gimcrack, ramshackle governance structure that we're propping up, another door falls off its hinges.”
“Too many of the other buildings around the lagoon had long since slipped and slid away below the silt, revealing their gimcrack origins, and the Ritz now stood in splendid isolation on the west shore, even the rich blue moulds sprouting from the carpets in the dark corridors adding to its 19th-century dignity.”
“Don Black's gimcrack lyrics range from the instantly forgettable to the indelibly horrific: "Well, who would have thought that a waitress from Rowena / Would have had the balls to bust me out my old .45 / And who would have thought that a farm boy from Teleco / Would outsmart the smartest lawmen and walk out of here alive?”
“The people who donate 100 bucks so they can get the gimcrack with the PBS station logo on it will still be watching”
“Niall Ferguson, no Europhile, recently wrote in these pages: "The real choice is between becoming a fully fledged United States of Europe … and a gimcrack hodgepodge … that will sooner or later fall apart.”
“The real choice is between becoming a fully fledged United States of Europe, or remaining little more than a modern-day Holy Roman Empire, a gimcrack hodgepodge of "variable geometry" that will sooner or later fall apart.”
“I'm not sure that I'd go so far as to relegate the Wii to the realm of the gimcrack, but nor am I convinced that Nintendo has managed to absolve the console of such charges as fully as it might.”
“But Mr. Baudelaire, like so many artists today, has fashioned his work to illustrate a gimcrack theory.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘gimcrack’.
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Words that sound dirty but aren't.
When you want to be pedantic AND childish.
titular, masticate, condiment, titmouse, penal, formication, social intercourse, assassination, cacophony, lucubrate, rectify, banal and 117 more...
pmaccabe A good up-to-date example sentence at the very end of this article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/237645/page/3 May 9, 2010
hernesheir (n): A tastelessly showy thing; a trivial device or object in the sense of being cheap, tacky, flashy, garish, gaudy.
cf. gewgaw and bauble Dec 30, 2008