rococo

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A style of art, especially architecture and decorative art, that originated in France in the early 18th century and is marked by elaborate ornamentation, as with a profusion of scrolls, foliage, and animal forms.
2. n. A very ornate style of speech or writing.
3. n. Music A style of composition arising in 18th-century France, often viewed as an extension of the baroque, and characterized by a high degree of ornamentation and lightness of expression.
4. adj. Of or relating to the rococo.
5. adj. Immoderately elaborate or complicated.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A variety of ornament originating in the Louis-Quatorze style and continuing with constantly increasing inorganic exaggeration and extravagance throughout the artistic degeneracy of the Louis-Quinze. It is generally a meaningless, though often a very rich, assemblage of fantastic scrolls and crimped conventional shell-work, wrought into irregular and indescribable forms, without individuality and without expression apart from its usually costly material and surroundings. The style has a certain interest from its use in a great number of sumptuous European residences, and from its intimate association with a social life of great outward refinement and splendor. Much of the painting, engraving, porcelain-work, etc., of the time has, too, a real decorative charm, though not of a very high order in art. Hence rococo is used attributively in contempt to note anything feebly pretentious and tasteless in art or literature. Compare baroque.
2. n. Especially— A kind of China-ribbon embroidery.
3. n. A kind of Roman work.

Wiktionary

1. n. A style of baroque architecture and decorative art, from 18th century France, having elaborate ornamentation.
2. adj. Of, or relating to the rococo style.
3. adj. Over-elaborate or complicated.
4. adj. Old-fashioned.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. A florid style of ornamentation which prevailed in Europe in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
2. adj. Of or pertaining to the style called rococo; like rococo; florid; fantastic.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. fanciful but graceful asymmetric ornamentation in art and architecture that originated in France in the 18th century
2. adj. having excessive asymmetrical ornamentation