piquancy

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“
It gave her a curious piquancy, and interested him.

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Definitions (5)

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  1. Piquant quality. Agreeable pungency or sharpness, as of flavor or taste. Pleasing cleverness or raciness, as of manner, style, etc. A mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking. George Eliot, Mill on the Floss, vii. 4. “How disturbed?” inquired Holgrave. “By things without, or by thoughts within?” “I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?” replied Phœbe, with simple piquancy. Hawthorne, Seven Gables, xii. Our American life is dreadfully barren of those elements of the social picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. Lowell, Study Windows, p. 91.
  2. Keenness; sharpness; tartness; severity, as of remark or utterance. Commonly also satyrical taunts do owe their seeming piquancy, not to the speaker or his words, but to the subject and the hearers. Barrow, Sermons, I. xiv.

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Examples (50)

  • He had every quality necessary for the sway of a popular audience—fine elocution, marvelous fluency, piquancy, the courage of his convictions and a magnetism that swept all before him. —  Recollections of a Long Life
  • Glossop's triumph has an added piquancy, as it is the smallest town ever to have a team in the English league's top division - in the 1899-1900 season, when they finished bottom. —  The Guardian World News
  • It gave her a curious piquancy, and interested him. —  A Little Girl in Old Quebec
  • I glanced guiltily at my victim; she sat there, the incarnation of New York piquancy--a translated denizen of the metropolis--a slender spirit of the back offices of sky-scrapers. —  In Search of the Unknown
  • There was a piquancy, a sharp flavor, in his talk that was delightful. —  California Sketches, Second Series
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