Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The quality of being saccharine.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the excessive sweetness of saccharin

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Perhaps if the author, recalling vain pasts, could realize the scum of saccharinity in which the play is utterly submerged, and that it struggles with great difficulty to survive the nesselrodelike sweetness with which it is surfeited, he would recognize the real distinction that Barrymore lends to a rôle so clogged by the honeyed sentimentality covering most of the scenes.

    Adventures in the Arts Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets Marsden Hartley

  • She displayed an overwhelming saccharinity that was appalling.

    The Pirates of Ersatz Murray Leinster 1935

  • Elise Polko has worked up an elaborate fiction on this affair with her usual saccharinity.

    The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Hughes, Rupert, 1872-1956 1903

  • Rose-Cross wilds, which, when agitated, sprays the air -- so the poet, laboring obesely under his emotion, smiled with a sweetness so intolerable that the air seemed to be squirted full of saccharinity to the point of plethoric saturation.

    Iole Arthur C. [Illustrator] Becker 1899

  • I've yet to see an adequate explanation for that which doesn't turn on some nonsense about students being the light of a teacher's life or similarly saccharinity (I made it up; deal).

    To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth 2009

  • Aristotle regarded such figures and fancies as "adornments," but in the 19th century (which saw the birth both of Spooner and Sir James A.H. Murray's monstrous lexicographical child) the icing on the cake, all froth and saccharinity to the humorless rhetorician, becomes in fact the entire bill of fare; the rhetorical flourish, all we can discern of rhetoric, and the play on words, the word itself.

    VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XI No 3 1984

  • Bad as is the principle, the selections are worse, including the saccharinity ineffable of Tennyson's Princess (a strange expression of the progressive feminization of the high school and yet satirizing the scholastic aspiration of girls) which the virile boy abhors, books about books which are two removes from life, and ponderous Latinity authors which for the Saxon boy suggest David fighting in Saul's armor, and which warp and pervert the nascent sentence-sense on a foreign model.

    Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene G. Stanley Hall 1885

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