Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Foolish quality or action.
  • noun The dress or manner of a fop.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Foolishness; foolery; foolish vanity; vain show.
  • noun A foolish or mocking exhibition.
  • noun Vain ornaments; gewgaws.
  • noun Affectation of precision in trifles, or fastidious observance of the prevailing fashion; dandyism: as, the foppery of dress or of manners.
  • Foppish; foolish.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The behavior, dress, or other indication of a fop; coxcombry; affectation of show; showy folly.
  • noun Folly; foolery.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The dress or actions of a fop
  • noun Stupidity

Etymologies

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Examples

  • I can tell you without a doubt … I’d allow myself to be staked out on top of a fire ant pile for three days before I’d have appeared at this sycophantic exercise in foppery, irrelevance and pathetic grandstanding!

    Thank God Joe Biden was at the beer summit. - Moe_Lane’s blog - RedState 2009

  • The descriptions are "high-falutin" beyond all endurance, and there is particularly noticeable a kind of stylistic foppery, which is always hovering between sublimity and a giggle.

    Some Diversions of a Man of Letters Edmund Gosse 1888

  • From a kind of foppery peculiar to himself, he wears the thick cloak of a common soldier.

    A Hero of Our Time 2003

  • From a kind of foppery peculiar to himself, he wears the thick cloak of a common soldier.

    A Hero of Our Time 1916

  • Edmund's speech, where the word "foppery" is a special clue:

    Montaigne and Shakspere 1894

  • He was handsome, and he knew that he was handsome; but he affected to despise the beauty of his proud dark face, as he affected to despise all the brightest and most beautiful things upon earth: and yet there was a vagabondish kind of foppery in his costume that contrasted sharply with the gentlemanly dandyism of the shabby gamester sitting at the table.

    Birds of Prey 1875

  • This "foppery" of Shakespeare's day had, then, its really delightful side, a quality in no sense "affected," by which it satisfies a real instinct in our minds -- the fancy so many of us have for an exquisite and curious skill in the use of words.

    Appreciations, with an Essay on Style Walter Pater 1866

  • a kind of foppery peculiar to himself, he wears the thick cloak of a common soldier.

    A Hero of Our Time Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov 1827

  • 'foppery' was a sufficient argument for detesting it.

    The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 Thomas De Quincey 1822

  • “I thought 'foppery' was a consequence of refinement

    Life of Lord Byron With His Letters And Journals Byron, George G 1854

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  • This gentleman, said I to myself, must be an original. I was not mistaken; his singularities were striking. On his entrance, he ran with open arms and embraced the company, male and female, one after another. His grimaces were more extravagant than any I had yet seen in this region of foppery.

    - Lesage, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, tr. Smollett, bk 3 ch. 11

    September 18, 2008

  • This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, -- often the surfeit of our own behaviour, -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.

    Shakespeare King Lear, 1. 2

    September 22, 2009